Enigmaticness Abounds
by Tierfal
Summary: In the long-awaited sequel to 'Her and Me,' Hell has frozen over; Draco and Hermione are, fairly literally, madly in love; and everything is fantabulousiriffic. Right?
1. Harrowing Things

_Author's Note: Evenin', guvnors. If you haven't read 'Her and Me,' you don't necessarily have to, but first, you might enjoy it; second, a lot of characters and out-of-characters are better explained there than they will be here; and third, I love semicolons._

_If you have read 'Her and Me,' you know all about me and my semicolon problem, and you're quite ready to jump in, as am I. Let's get down to it, shall we?_

* * *

Chapter One

Harrowing Things

Draco Malfoy had done a lot of harrowing things. He had thwarted the intricate, highly homicidal machinations of a Death Eater and a Ministry traitor. He had exposed the conspiracy those two particular nefarious villains had arranged. He had even survived Hermione Granger's cooking. But this—this was the most harrowing, most horrifying, most horrible yet.

He opened the door and let Hermione's mother in.

Marina Granger raised an eyebrow. "Draco?" she inquired.

Tentatively he smiled. "That's right," he confirmed. "Can I get you anything?"

"No, thank you, Draco."

"Can I take your coat?"

"No, thank you, Draco."

"Can I… can I…" He racked his brains and fidgeted a little. There had to be something chivalric and impressive left to do. There had to be something… Something… Anything…

"I see you got a new couch," Marina Granger remarked.

"Well, no, we didn't," Draco corrected. "We got a cover for it. It's really comfortable, but the orange was kind of… hideous."

"Orange," Marina Granger commented airily, "is my favorite color."

Draco resisted the urge to bury his face in those beige cover-covered cushions and scream at the top of his lungs. He settled with cringing.

Nonchalantly, Marina Granger strolled into the kitchen and seated herself at the table. She folded her hands and set them on the tabletop, and then she looked up at Draco expectantly with eyes very similar to her daughter's—deep, dark, and, at the moment, supremely unsettling. Like wells. Draco had the distinct feeling that he was going to fall into the wells in question and ignominiously drown. It was the sort of thing that would happen to him.

"If you sit down," Mrs. Granger remarked, "we could have a civilized conversation."

Oh, so _that_ was what she'd wanted. And here he'd been, loitering awkwardly in the doorway like a bumpkin. How utterly barbaric.

As he obeyed the summons, Draco reflected that he wasn't sure whether he was being sarcastic or not. That was when you _knew_ you were in trouble.

"Sure I can't get you something?" he hazarded, seeking to make up some lost ground.

A dark eyebrow flickered up. It was another very Hermione-ish gesture, and it was entirely discomfiting. You didn't want to see the love of your life appearing in her mother. You just didn't. There was something very wrong and very Greek-tragedy-worthy about it.

Or maybe bad-Hollywood-movie-worthy.

"I'm fine," Mrs. Granger said.

Draco wanted to chew on his fingernails. _Then why are you looking at me like you want to skin me alive? _he wondered.

Marina Granger pursed her lips and looked at the refrigerator. It was there that Draco had secured a scrap of paper reminding him that the "Triple Bacon Supreme (i.e. Triple-Bypass Special) at Cleon's Pizza – muy bueno!!". Even that wouldn't have been as bad if he hadn't arranged the little word magnets holding it there to read, "The cat lady is way hot stuff." Draco felt another high-quality cringe coming on.

"How do you feel about children?" Mrs. Granger asked suddenly.

"Uh," Draco managed. "I… like… them…"

_For dinner!_ his mind supplied gleefully.

_Shut up!_ he reprimanded sternly. _This is important!_

_Spoilsport,_ his mind muttered.

The other eyebrow joined its partner high on Mrs. Granger's forehead. "And how do you feel about marriage?" she inquired next.

"Um," Draco attempted, "I think it is a venerable and sanctified union."

Draco got the distinct feeling she wanted to go over to the counter, draw the cleaver from the knife block, and summarily split his head with it. Kindly, she refrained.

Then Mrs. Granger dropped the _real_ bomb.

"Are you sleeping with my daughter?" she demanded.

Draco stared at her. He stared for a full ten seconds, and then he stared some more. He blinked a few times. Then, for some variety, he recommenced staring in disbelief.

Mrs. Granger shifted in her seat. "Well, are you?" she prompted.

"No," Draco said slowly. "I am not." As she opened her mouth, he beat her to the chase. "Which is not to say," he added, "that I don't _want_ to and am simply taking advantage of her insane generosity despite not having any interest in her person. I have quite an interest in her person. I also have quite an interest in her personality. No, sleeping with your daughter would be a very amenable activity, as far as I'm concerned, but I respect her more than that."

Mrs. Granger looked like she might even forgive him for the note on the fridge.

He owed Hermione a lot; that much he knew—when he had been in the direst straits in the history of dire straits, she had taken him in and taken him under her wing, including fattening him up, apparently without ever intending to put him in the oven afterward (though he supposed there was still a remote possibility of prospective cannibalism). Oh, yeah, and saved his life about a million times and whatnot.

Thinking back on it, he felt like he should have known the moment he'd seen her name in the Daily Prophet and considered seeking her aid—should have known that she fit the highly-touted, highly-trite bill of "The One." Glancing through the newspaper, trying to conceal his face with it and shield himself from the shame of recognition, trying to become just another person with somewhere to go, he had spotted the words _Hermione Granger_, and he should have felt something warm and glowing deep in the fabric of his very soul.

Now, he _hadn't_, but he still _should_ have.

It just went to show that desperation put a bit of a damper on love at first notice-after-a-long-time.

"What do you do for a living, Draco?" Mrs. Granger inquired, sounding rather pleasanter, and rather less homicidal, now.

"Ah," Draco said, shifting in his seat a little. This was the part that assaulted his masculinity in the manner of an overzealous pit-bull, complete with glinting red eyes and ivory fangs dripping with ropy saliva. "I am…" Should he, or shouldn't he? Should, or shouldn't? Should, or should— "…an amanuensis."

Even though that word in particular referred more to a dictation-taker. There was a chance that his antagonistic interrogator—er, prospective mother-in-law—would simply let it go.

Or… not.

The warmth in Mrs. Granger's eyes retreated again, like a wave sliding away down the sand, just out of reach. "A what?" she prompted.

Draco hung his head. "A secretary," he sighed, looking intently at his fidgeting hands. _That finger, this finger, that finger, this finger…_

"Oh?" He thought he might have detected a hint of a smile in Mrs. Granger's voice, but he didn't look up for two reasons. First, he didn't want to find out that it was merely wishful thinking; second, his fingers were rather interesting, to tell the truth.

"Yes." _ This finger, that finger, this finger—_

_CAT_.

Sparky had appeared, in all his three-legged, one-and-a-half-eared glory, in Draco's lap. He then proceeded to apply his existing foreleg to the arduous task of kneading the living Hell out of Draco's thigh.

Presuming, that was, that there had been Hell living in Draco's thigh in the first place, but now was not the time to quibble over colloquialisms. Rather, now was the time to meet Marina Granger's eyes tentatively and discover that they were sparkling a little with amusement.

Draco supposed that one had to have something of a sadistic streak in order to practice dentistry, given that one was basically injuring people under pretense of advancing their dental well-being from nine to five on weekdays, and there was little he could think of more sadistically enjoyable than making a man confess that he was a secretary.

To Hell with his dignity; time to make her squirm with glee.

"_Hermione's_ secretary," he specified.

Marina Granger's eyes lit up like bonfires.

As Sparky mangled his leg beyond recognition and Mrs. Granger began a long tangent about how lovely it was that an upright young man like himself should be willing to work under a female without complaint, which segued nicely into a tangent about how they would be wise to be fastidious in separating their personal lives and their professional ones, which segued poorly into a tangent on Goodness, wasn't that a pretty picture on the calendar?, Draco realized resignedly, and not entirely without some dry sort of happiness, that this woman was going to be in his life for a long time. _  
_

* * *

_Author's Note Again: So… welcome back, or welcome for the first time, depending on whether you're a HaM fan or not. All is written; twenty chapters and an appendix; one every Monday and Friday until I get greedy and start posting Wednesdays, too, just like last time._

_It is probably my civil duty to warn you, however, that, unlike last time, this fic… is… um… not _quite _as funny. It seems to oscillate between the usual humor and more serious stuff. If there was such a genre as humor/romance/adventure/angst, that would do, but there isn't (and for good reason…!). I hope all the HaM fans will bear with me, and that newcomers can find something to love. :)_

_And Eltea is mostly behind the plot, that crafty girl. Because I suck at plots like whoa. Also, she betaed. At an absurd hour of the morning. Instead of sleeping. Show some love, dammit._

_Additionally, it is my civil duty to warn you that I am addicted to alliterations. Like that one._

_Grammatically,_

_Tierfal_


	2. A Perilous Emergency

_Author's Note: Yes, dialogue is my crutch. (limps around a little) No, wait, dialogue is all I've got. Silly me!_

_As far as reviews go, reviews make me feel popular, the misleading appearance of popularity makes me happy, and happiness makes me write more stuff._

_/bribe. _

* * *

Chapter Two

A Perilous Emergency

Hermione Granger would have liked to stand by Draco and give him moral support while he tried to deal with her mother. She had trouble dealing with her mother herself, and she had amassed over two decades of experience. But this—_this_—was an emergency.

Or, at least, that was what Ginny had said it was over the phone.

"What kind of emergency?" Hermione had asked.

"_The kind where you stop asking questions and come over here right now, Hermione Granger_!" Ginny had howled back.

Hermione had held the receiver away from her ear for a moment. "Okay. Okay, all right. I'll be there in a minute."

"You'll what?" Draco had squeaked.

Hermione put the phone down, crossed the kitchen to him, and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. "You'll be fine," she assured him. "She'll _love_ you."

"Yeah, she'll love _eating me alive_." Draco buried his face in his hands. "I'm _dooooomed_."

"Don't be ridiculous. Besides, Ginny's got an emergency."

"Is it a flood? Is it an earthquake? Has she been poisoned? Is her house caving in? Is her grandmother on fire? Is her _life imperiled by this 'emergency'_?"

"You'll be fine," Hermione had repeated. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

She'd Apparated, somewhat reluctant to leave him moaning in the middle of her kitchen. Their kitchen. The kitchen. That room with the refrigerator and the stove in it.

Ginny whipped the door open, dragged Hermione in, and slammed it shut. "Come on, come on—Harry and Ron are at lunch—Ilsa's already here—you're _late_; you don't _care_ about me—"

"Ginny," Hermione said, slowly and as levelly as possible given that she was stumbling on the carpet, "I hate to break it to you, but you've lost your marbles. Not even just a few of them. All of them. Every last one."

Ginny sat her down at the counter on a stool next to the one occupied by Ilsa Weasley, Ron's wife. "Sit," Ginny commanded. "Stay."

"Roll over?" Hermione predicted.

Ginny gave her a bona fide Death Glare.

"What's the problem, Ginny?" Ilsa asked, nervously, it seemed.

Laying her hands flat on the marble countertop, Ginny sucked in a deep breath. Cautiously, she released it. "Okay," she said, sounding saner now. "It's Harry."

There was a pause as she waited for them to prompt her.

"What about Harry?" Hermione sighed, playing along.

"He's doing _horrible_ things!" Ginny cried.

"'Horrible things,'" Ilsa repeated slowly. "Like… murdering people?"

Ginny wailed and put her hands over her eyes.

"Not murdering them—accessory to murder?" Hermione hazarded.

Ginny wailed louder.

"Uh, hijacking trains and robbing the passengers?" Ilsa attempted.

"Gambling away your children's college funds?"

"Gambling away your children?"

"Selling crack to children? Selling crack to _your_ children?"

"_No_!" Ginny shouted at last. "He's watching American football!"

There was a long pause.

"It's_bad_," Ginny persisted, blushing now. "It's not like he just watches it on weekends. He watches it _all _the time. He uses that Muggle tape-y record-y thing—"

"TiVo?" Hermione asked.

"I wish Ron and I had TiVo," Ilsa remarked. "If we did, I wouldn't have missed that one episode of _Doctor Who_."

"Which episode?" Hermione inquired.

"The one with the aliens."

Hermione considered. "They've _all_ got aliens. The _Doctor_ is an alien. The Dalek aliens?"

"No, not the Daleks—"

Very loudly and distinctly, Ginny cleared her throat.

Ilsa and Hermione looked at her.

"Okay," Hermione said patiently. "Are you listening? Good. You go to Harry. You tell him you're very glad that he's found something he loves to do so much—"

"But I'm _not_," Ginny protested.

"Well, you lie and say you are," Hermione informed her. "Then you tell him that as glad as you are, you wish there was something you could do _together_. Like fly fishing, or selling crack to children."

"Or you could just watch American football _with_ him," Ilsa supplied.

Ginny folded her arms miserably and leaned against the counter. "I don't want to seem like I'm meddling in his life…"

"You are," Ilsa and Hermione told her at once.

"But it shouldn't _seem_ like it!" Ginny cried. She seized upon Hermione. "You have to do it."

"Me?"

"Yes, you! You've been Harry's friend forever, and you're my best friend!" She paused. "Well, you and Ilsa. But Ilsa doesn't know the dirt on Harry." She took up her urgent plea again. "_You've_ got to tell him! It's all right if his _friend_ meddles, just not his wife!"

Hermione stared at her. "You really have lost all your marbles. Every last one. All the marbles are gone."

"Bye-bye, marbles," Ilsa agreed helpfully.

Ginny stuck out her bottom lip. "Please?"

"Never," Hermione replied crisply.

"But_please_?"

"Ginny, no!"

"But_pleeeeeeeease_?" She looked up at Hermione piteously, her lip protruding even further, her brown eyes round and wide.

"Not the _face_!" Hermione tried to block the image with her hands, attempting to resist the Grand and Cowing Power of the Puppy Eyes.

"Come on, Hermione, for _me_? _Please_?"

"Okay!" Hermione yielded. "Okay, fine, fine!" As Ginny sighed contentedly, Hermione panted, winded by the effort of fighting the Puppy Eye Power as long as she had. "I feel," she gasped, "like I just signed my soul to the Devil."

"Close," Ilsa noted.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

When she returned to the Number 78, Hermione didn't see the lovely blond man she was looking for.

"Draco?" she called, jingling her keys for good measure. "Draco, you're here, right?"

"In the kitchen," he called.

She found him sitting at the table, staring at his hands where he had folded them on the tabletop.

"Are you okay?" she asked worriedly, approaching.

"I survived," he said slowly, as if he couldn't believe it. He looked up at her, and a sunny smile spread gradually across his face. "I survived your mother."

Hermione grinned. "I knew you would."

"I was very seriously beginning to doubt my chances," he noted dryly.

As she, grinning, sat down in his lap, he winced, and she hesitated. "What?" she asked.

Draco managed a shaky smile heavily laced with smirk. "Your cat made mincemeat of the limb upon which you are currently sitting," he explained.

Hermione looked down at Draco's leg (around her own rear end, of course, which was sort of in the way of her looking), then up at Draco's face. She raised an eyebrow. "He has one front paw," she noted dryly.

This astute observation garnered a shrug from Draco. "He uses it very effectively."

Hermione wriggled a little, settling better, and smiled as Draco made a show of cringing.

"You've inherited some of your mother's sadism," he reported.

"If you release your inner masochist," she replied innocently, "we'll get along fine. Anyway, what I was going to say was that we should have a party sometime. A big one. Invite all the Weasleys, and the Lupins, and Ginny and Harry and everyone."

Draco blinked at her. Then he blinked at the rest of the kitchen, then he blinked at the doorway that ushered one into the living room. "Have you forgotten," he asked, "that we are currently inhabiting a four-room apartment?"

Nestling closer to him, Hermione gazed at him with wide, sad eyes. "Don't crush my dreams, Draco," she told him. "It makes my sweet, fragile little soul bleed."

Draco frowned at her. "Well, then, your dreams should relocate themselves to a bigger house," he noted. "Possibly one that is borrowed. Possibly without asking its owner first."

A thought stirred in Hermione's brain, shuddering once, then swelling warmly and gently until the bubble burst and released a snippet of brilliance. She grinned. "I just had the best idea ever," she informed Draco.

He considered her warily. "Does it have to do with zombies and ancient artifacts and a death-defying quest to stop the Russian mafia and save the universe as we know it?"

Eyebrows clambering up her forehead, Hermione blinked back at him. "Um, no."

Draco relaxed visibly. "Oh, good. Those usually don't turn out too well. Problems in the execution, you know."

"I was thinking we should have our party at Malfoy Manor."

Draco un-relaxed abruptly. "Oh, not good. Very, very not good."


	3. Quite Another Thing

_Author's Note: Go to my website; it will bring joy to your soul. Actually, it will mostly make me puff up like a blowfish. A very happy blowfish. Plus there will be a picture of a Cars Bar and possibly eventually an origami tutorial. And you can be my LiveJournal friend!_

_And Eltea—OMG LOOK IT'S TYRUS AHAHAHA. And "alacrity"!!! (giggles uncontrollably)_

_Everyone else: Sorry about that. I'm afraid I succumb to temporary insanity with some frequency. Your reward for putting up with me is a fairly long chapter._

_All due apologies to the Tolkien Estate._

* * *

Chapter Three

Quite Another Thing

Draco had slept on a lot of things in his twenty-one years: trash bags, feather beds, park benches, moth-eaten youth hostel mattresses, Hermione's orange couch, and, once upon an infancy, his mother's shoulder, upon which he had then proceeded to throw up with gusto. But he had never slept on an idea, or at least not one quite as insane as this one was shaping up to be.

It was one thing to say, "Let's go to the manor and see what happens," and it was quite another thing to go to the manor and see what happened.

Draco tapped the end of his quill against his Ministry stationery. Tiny drops of indigo ink splashed onto the paper and splattered on his hand like freckles—freckles in need of a bit of an explanation about the color spectrum. He set his quill down, pushed his latest scheduling notes aside, and pulled out a pack of sticky notes and the origami book he had borrowed from the library.

He was fairly proud of his origami accomplishments. He could make little boxes and hats now to go with his cranes, which he created in flocks and fleets, and he was slowly filling an entire drawer of his desk with his sticky note brainchildren.

After contributing to the desk-drawer-filling quest a bit, he retrieved the schedules again and filled in a few things. Hermione liked her schedules color-coded, and rather than risking the Wrath of the Granger-Tyrant-Boss-Lady, Draco tended to oblige, which meant that he soon had some green, red, and purple ink-spot decorations on his hand as well. Considering this advent, he reflected that he looked a bit like a Christmas tree, or perhaps someone with a very confused case of chicken pox.

Whatever the circumstances, the morning was crawling by. He looked at where his writing had trailed off into a bit of a hurricane-ish-looking muddle all over the twenty-first of January, put the pen down, and weighed his options.

_Chocolate. Need. Sugar? Mine. Verbs? Syntax? No. Bad. Structure? Unh._

He heaved himself up from his desk chair, strode down the hall, and faced his latest nemesis: the vending machine.

The endless rows of diabetes and death in their bright, shiny packages lay there innocently, as they always did, cradled by those fascinating spiral contraptions that held them fast, and Draco had to fold his hands tightly behind his back lest he press his palms excitedly to the glass. They were so… _pretty_… so…_tasty_… so… _wonderful_…

Unable to suppress his desperate urge any longer, he jammed a few Sickles into the slot, pressed in the code, and watched raptly as the machine released the specimen he had selected. He retrieved his prize from the slot at the bottom and clutched it to his chest, glancing suspiciously around him.

_Mine. My… Precioussssss…_

Upon return to his workstation, he set his Precious on his desktop and took a moment merely to admire it. It was his favorite: the Cars Bar. For about an eighteenth of a second, he thought about things like cholesterol and saturated fat, and then he shoved that madness from his mind, tussled with the wrapper, and freed his Precious.

The twelve rectangular sections sat gleaming, waiting to be broken from the whole or devoured all at once, and Draco gazed at them reverently. They looked almost like…

…caskets to hold a man dead by twenty-five because he ate half his weight in candy on a daily basis.

Living with Hermione and her Health Nut Complex (sometimes Draco wished Freud had had the grace to live nowadays instead of when he had) was really hurting Draco's eating habits. And by "hurting," he meant "drastically improving," but it was still an extremely painful process, separating him from his sugar.

Ergo he would simply carry on his illicit love affair with chocolate in secret, if need be.

He broke off the top row and crammed it in his mouth, then followed it up with the second and third rows. Chocolate was basically like richer air, anyway, and traditional breathing was pretty overrated in the first place.

Hermione chose that moment to emerge from her office, pausing as she saw him doing his best Chocoholic Chipmunk impression.

"Is that a Cars Bar?" she inquired.

He nodded.

An eyebrow flicked up. "It's ten in the morning," she noted.

He nodded again.

"And you're eating chocolate," she concluded.

He nodded a third time, and then he offered her the last quarter of the bar, which was roughly akin to offering her a quarter of his soul.

"Oh," she said, "thank you." She took it and nibbled on the end a bit, setting a manila folder on his desk as she did. She opened the folder and tapped a fingertip on its contents, which included a few very melodramatic mug-shots paper-clipped to a series of papers. The ugly man in the foremost picture scowled and leered at Draco, who was very tempted to make some faces in return. "This is Perry Simons's report on the latest Auror targets. If you could give it a look and see if there's anything I omitted in my notes, that'd be excellent." She put another folder down on top of its predecessor. "And if you could clean this one up a little—there's some extra copies, I think, and it'll just take a minute or two." Another folder joined its folder brethren. "This one needs to go to Improper Use—" And another; Draco was beginning to think that Hermione should enter a folder-stacking contest. "—and this one to Equipment Control. I've got to take this to Tyrus." She waved a different folder, smiling.

Draco found that slightly odd; he wouldn't have been smiling at the prospect of facing the craggy-faced, chain-smoking Minister of Magic. Then again, perhaps Hermione was prepared for things like that. Perhaps when you were the Minister—Ministress? Draco wasn't sure, and he was kind of embarrassed to ask—of Magical Law Enforcement, you were ready to approach even the sketchiest of head honchos with alacrity. "If I'm not back in time to meet whoever it is that's scheduled for ten-thirty," Hermione added, winking broadly, "entertain them with your many charms."

Draco smiled slowly and evilly, and he was rewarded with a laugh.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Not long later, Draco found himself strolling down the hall to deliver one stackable manila folder or another. Hermione's notes had been impeccable, and Perry Simons's report had been highly disturbing, so everything was pretty much in order.

Ha, _Order_.

Dynesy Cranot, head of the Department of Magical Catastrophes, was coming the other way, and he smiled that slightly-bemused smile of his upon seeing Draco. "Do something with your hair?" he asked.

"Slept on it funny," Draco answered truthfully.

"Looks good," Dynesy decided.

"Thanks," Draco replied.

He hummed the 1812 Overture to himself a little, mostly on-key. Working here wasn't too bad, most of the time.

He'd have to teach Dynesy how to make origami cranes.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It was just after midnight, and Hermione was still sitting up against the headboard, reading the contents of some new manila folder she had acquired. Draco was pretty sure the damn things reproduced while you weren't looking.

"Sleep is good," he noted for the eight-billionth time. "Sleep is your friend. Look at Sparky; he sleeps for about three-quarters of the day. Have you ever seen a happier cat?"

"I'm almost done," Hermione insisted, as she had insisted every one of the other eight billion times.

"Fine," he acceded. He scooped Sparky up and set the cat upon his chest, then proceeded to ruffle his feline friend's fur suggestively. "Oh,_ Sparky_," he moaned. "Your lack of a leg is _such_ a turn-on. Get away, you sexy _beast_, before I die of _lust_." The cat blinked, and Draco hissed conspiratorially, "_Play along_."

When Sparky tilted his head and then immediately moved to nuzzle Draco's neck persistently, Draco began to suspect that Sparky was, in some horrifying, twisted way, distantly related to Albert Einstein.

Or maybe he was just hungry.

Probably just hungry.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Despite all that he'd said about the virtues of sleep and rest and calm and other such things that were easier described than attained, Draco found himself lying awake long after Hermione's breathing had evened out, long after she'd settled against him, her forehead touching his shoulder, his right arm firmly in her possession, Sparky a ball of gently purring gray fuzz between them. He looked at her, with her wild hair around her face like a blurry halo, and the words stirred a little.

There were a great many words he wanted to say, and a few that were more important still than the others. Those ones, the important ones, rose then, rose in his throat, gathered, swelled, roared—

—subsided, slipped back down, and sank and settled in the pit of his stomach again, tugging the walls of it in towards them and spurring a bout of nausea.

Or maybe that was a result of all of the chocolate he'd inhaled today.

It was one thing to know something, know it with the kind of certainty that could knock you right off your feet in the middle of crossing a busy street and get you splattered on the asphalt, and it was quite another thing to say it.


	4. Puns, Preserves, and Paranoia

_Author's Note: You approach a wide, white, silent plain. You peer around. There seems to be nothing here but you, a vast, endless emptiness—and a few dust bunnies. What is this place? How did you come to be here? How do you get out?_

_The answers: MY BRAIN. YOU CLICKED. YOU CAN'T._

* * *

Chapter Four

Puns, Preserves, and Paranoia

The alarm blared remorselessly at six forty-five the next morning, as the alarm always did, and Hermione wriggled out of the labyrinth of limbs that was her and Draco and the cat to slam a hand down on its arching plastic spine, silencing it for another twenty-four hours. Half-off of the bed, half-caught in sheets like Devil's Snare, Hermione paused and looked back. As if on cue, Draco rolled over, muttered something about pandas and pudding, and buried his face in the pillow. Hermione desperately wanted to go back, to dive under the covers again, to curl up next to him and to slide once more into the warm oblivion of sleep. But she couldn't do that. It was time to get up, go to work, and get something productive done. It was time to be an adult.

As she looked at her tangled hair and her tired eyes in the mirror, Hermione wondered just why it was that she felt like a better human being when she denied herself the things she wanted.

She was showered, fully dressed, and slathering jam on her toast when Draco stumbled into the kitchen, bedecked in the usual green-and-gray-plaid pajama pants and gray T-shirt, Sparky trailing along asymmetrically at his heels. Draco's hair was, as usual, in disarray, fluffier than a Persian kitten at the mercy of a blow-dryer and about as adorable. He reached the refrigerator, delved a hand in, and paused, contemplating her breakfast, as his fingers groped around for the orange juice.

"There is something inherently flawed about toast," he said.

Hermione blinked at him.

"There is," he persisted calmly. "You toast the bread with the intent of making it hot and slightly crispy, yes? It is the convergence of temperature and texture that gives it its toast-ish identity. And then…" He nodded to the jar of jam on the table. "…you put things on it, be they jam or butter or what have you. Said condiments come from the fridge, and therefore are cold, and_there_fore, unless you spread them and then consume it remarkably quickly, compromise the temperature of your toast, which we have established is a crucial part of its appeal in the first place."

Hermione stared at him, the beleaguered piece of toast suspended in her hand growing colder by the moment.

Draco shrugged. "Just noticing," he commented.

_Just noticing with a long, detailed, and eloquent tirade,_ Hermione thought. She took a bite of her toast. _So this is what 'inherently flawed' tastes like…_

Draco poured himself some orange juice, replaced the carton in the fridge, and sat down at the table pensively. "I've also always wondered," he said, "what the difference is between jam, jelly, and preserves."

Hermione raised an eyebrow at him, smiling slightly. "You're very ponderous this morning."

He raised an eyebrow in retaliation. "Cruel verbal pun, Miss Granger. Cruel and unusual."

"Preserves and jam are essentially the same thing," Hermione announced, "and they include pieces of the original fruit, whereas jelly does not." She pointed to the miniscule blueberries perched on her toast, swimming in a viscous sea of blueberriness. As Draco looked on with interest, she began to worry that she had acquired his tendency to coin new words when she couldn't find an existing one she liked.

Really—_blueberriness_?

Draco put his head down on the table and examined his juice from there. "Life is very complicated," he said.

Hermione took another inherently flawed bite of toast. "True," she noted.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Just after eleven, Draco pressed on the button that connected his phone to hers.

"There's one, ah, Alastor Moody to see you," he announced.

Draco had recently figured out the concept of letting go of the button, but the door was thin, and, as a consequence, Hermione was able to hear the conversation that followed.

"You look familiar," Mad-Eye rumbled.

"Ah, I'm sure that's not the case, sir. In fact, I'm sure we've never met." Draco's valiant attempt at a winning smile was audible in his voice.

Hermione could imagine Moody's good eye narrowing—and his namesake one wandering aimlessly, of course. "What's your name, boy?"

Faintly, but detectably, Hermione heard a scraping noise that she strongly suspected came from Draco turning his name plate around. "Ah… I think Miss Granger can see you now."

"Well, we're not talking about Miss Granger right now, are we? We're talking about _you_. Why do you make me think of a fer—"

"Good_morning_, Alastor!" Hermione greeted him emphatically, jerking her office door open. "How are you?"

Moody eyed her… well, _moodily_. "Awful," he answered, a growl underlying his voice as usual. "They're after me again." His normal eye focused on her, glinting like a beetle's back, and his abnormal one swiveled to trap Draco against the back of his chair again.

Poor Draco. He looked like he'd almost worked up the nerve to flee for some coffee or something. No such luck.

Hermione smiled, partly at Draco's terror, partly at Moody's paranoia. Both of them were rather endearing.

"Come on in, Alastor," she urged—or, rather, coaxed. "I got Simons's report yesterday."

"Simons," Moody muttered as she ushered him in, "is hopeless in the field. Kid's damn good with paperwork, though. Paperwork wizard."

Hermione very much doubted that Moody had intended to make the pun, given that it seemed like a supremely un-Moody thing to do, so she bit back a laugh and settled behind her desk, folding her hands on the tabletop and attempting to look efficient and important.

"It seems like most of the major threats are new players," she noted, shuffling through the thick folder and trying very hard not to howl with laughter over the moustaches Draco had drawn on the pictures and the sarcastic comments he had left in the margins. He was usually very good about staying businesslike, but he'd known that this was her personal copy, so he had taken some liberties.

She appreciated it. It made the work a lot easier. And a _Hell_ of a lot more entertaining.

"Which would indicate to me," she went on, "that we've tracked down most of the old Death Eaters."

Moody scowled a little. "It's one thing to say," he cautioned, "and another thing to know for certain. They're snakes through and through, Hermione. They've got holes to hide in, and they use 'em. You say you've got 'em all corralled and controlled, and the next thing you know, you're stumbling into the nest."

There were a lot of things to be said for Alastor Moody, but Hermione wouldn't have expected "author of extensive metaphors" to be among them. Somehow, he didn't strike her as much of a poet.

Moody leaned back in the chair he was occupying opposite her and tapped the end of his wooden leg absently against the edge of Hermione's desk. "Lot of amateurs nowadays," he remarked quietly, almost to himself. "Lot of old hands went down in the war, and we've got a lot of kids in places kids shouldn't have to be. Kids like Simons; kids like you."

Hermione smiled a little, unsure what to do to prevent him from waxing any more nostalgic. "Well," she replied, "it's a good thing, then, that we've got people like you to help."

Moody looked at her, with both varieties of eye at once, for a second or two. "You're doing all right," he decided.

Their acquaintance was not at the level at which Hermione could tell him just how much his approval meant, so she settled with "Thank you."

They talked about strategy a bit, and Hermione took notes, and Moody sighed a little more about the good old days, and then he stumped off to go organize some Aurors and give Perry Simons some crap about his unnecessary verbosity.

Hermione felt kind of bad for Perry; she got crap about her unnecessary verbosity with some consistency.

Not long after Moody had departed, presumably after unnerving Draco a bit more, she heard voices outside her door again.

"Hermione in? I've got some files for her." It sounded like Jonas Schaeffer, that cute, suave, dark-haired guy from Improper Use. "And… why is your name plate turned around?"

"Because," Draco responded, somewhat stuffily, "I… was… admiring it. Surely you've noticed how nice and shiny it is."

There was a pause. "I hadn't," Jonas said politely. "Are those… cranes… you're making?"

Hermione decided it was time to intervene before Draco, in a fit of despairing humiliation, hurt Jonas. Or himself. Or perhaps both of them at once, possibly with his nifty little Excalibur letter opener, which pulled out of a stone and everything. As she stepped out of her office, she found Draco glowering at Jonas somewhat petulantly. You might even say… enviously.

Hermione was pretty excited. She didn't think anyone had ever been jealous over her before.

Jonas flashed a toothy smile. "Got the ones you wanted," he told her, handing them over. "Color-coded just like you like them."

Hermione hadn't realized that the color-coding thing was quite so well-known, but she supposed that it _was_ advantageous. "Thank you," she told him.

Jonas nodded, smiled again, and sauntered off. Draco raised a pale eyebrow at his retreating back. "I don't like him," he announced.

Hermione couldn't help but smile to herself. "Oh?"

"He wears hellishly ugly ties."


	5. Smoke and Mirrors

_Author's Note: Lots of gushy love to everyone who helped push me over one hundred reviews in just four chapters. You peeps are the bomb. Chapter-related pun unintended but amazing._

_Also, it is assumed, for the sake of simplicity and preventing major in-law issues, that Hermione has never been to Malfoy Manor before._

* * *

Chapter Five

Smoke and Mirrors

The next morning, Draco was alternating staring at the loaf of bread on the counter and at the toaster, racking his brain for a way to improve the age-old process. Maybe if you put the jam-jelly-preserves-whatever on _first_… but then it might slide off, which would leave your toast quite bare and might also short-circuit your hapless toaster. No, that wouldn't do at all.

Hermione came in and peered over his shoulder. "Solving the world's great problems?" she inquired.

Draco nodded. "I think better toast outweighs hunger and world peace, really."

"Naturally." Maneuvering around him, she freed a slice of bread from the loaf's plastic confines and jammed (ha, that was the one without the pieces of fruit, right?) it in the slot, after which she went for the whatever-it-was and a knife. She handed Draco the orange juice.

He unscrewed the cap and peered into the carton. "I think we need a new, exciting juice. Like apple-kiwi-kumquat-pomelo-lime."

Hermione glanced up from her survey of the day's newspaper headlines. "That sounds deadly," she decided.

"Exactly," Draco replied. "It would be extremely exciting, not knowing if your next sip might be your _last_."

Hermione smiled. "Maybe we should see what they have next time we're at the store," she proposed.

Nodding absently, Draco found a glass and began to fill it. When he was halfway done, the toaster _ding_ed loudly and spat out Hermione's toast, making him start in surprise and send orange juice splashing everywhere.

_Ah,_ Draco thought. _One of _those_ days._

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It continued to be one of _those_ days as morning progressed. He managed to spill Hermione's coffee on himself three times on the two-minute walk from the break room back to her office, the pile of paperwork on his desk could have buried a small child such that little Timmy would never be seen again, and that dandy Jonas Schaeffer was back.

In addition, Draco had just resorted to thinking the word "dandy." _Honestly_—"dandy"?

"Hermione in?" Schaeffer purred, as if handing his report to her personally was the most important thing in the world, with the possible exception of brushing his blindingly-shiny teeth eighteen times a day.

"No," Draco informed him—curtly, it had to be admitted, but truthfully enough.

Schaeffer flashed a smile. No one, Draco was fairly sure, _flashed_ smiles quite so literally as did Jonas Schaeffer. Draco was coming to hate him and his smarmy assuredness and his hideous optical illusion ties. He was like a combination of Cedric Diggory, Gilderoy Lockhart, and—who was that obnoxious, self-aggrandizing boy Draco had known at school? Oh, yeah—_himself_.

This was a less-than-comforting thought.

Schaeffer schmoozed around a little while waiting, but when Hermione didn't show, eventually he set his folder on the top of the pile of them on Draco's desk and wandered off.

Draco had just returned his attention to the Obliviation Authorization form he was approving when the pile trembled, tipped, and tumbled. Schaeffer's addition had compromised the balance, and it all came down. A fat folder slammed into Draco's arm, shoving it over, his quill drawing a squiggly blue line across the form, and another pile of papers knocked over his ink bottle.

"Shit-Hell-bloody-damn-crap-_SchaefferIwillkillyou_," Draco muttered.

Hermione chose that moment to return. She paused upon seeing the blue ink staining his white shirt, not to mention his hands, probably his face, and most of his desktop, and then she provided a few quick cleaning spells, righted his folders (splitting them into _two smaller_ piles; clearly the woman was mad), and beamed at him genially.

"Thought about a party at the manor yet?" she asked.

Draco had been kind of hoping she would forget about that, taking "kind of" to mean "desperately." But no, women only forgot about things like the fact that beer was the sixth food group, and that broccoli was the Devil when you were a kid, and that the Devil did not go out of it when you cooked it in creative ways. They never forgot anything _convenient_.

Draco considered. He sort of wanted to tell her the truth—that it was the worst suggestion since Napoleon's "Hey, guys, let's invade_Russia_ in the _winter_; it'll be _awesome_!"—but Hermione had been so consistently good to him that it seemed grossly unfair to deny her something so small.

"How about," he managed, "I call them, and let's see if they'll let us come over and check it out this weekend?"

Hermione glowed a little brighter, and Draco knew he was sunk.

He supposed that he should have expected it. It _was_ one of _those_ days, after all.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

That week, Draco rediscovered a phenomenon that he hadn't experienced since he had been in school: he wished that the work-week, with all its little cruelties and all its trivial victories, would be over, and he also wished, with about equal fervor, that it would never end.

Unsurprisingly, the remainder of the week flew like a crumpled-up piece of paperwork pitched at the back of Jonas Schaeffer's head—or how Draco imagined that such a thing would fly; he hadn't tried it just yet.

"Ready?" he asked Hermione Saturday morning.

She nodded, but he knew he wasn't really asking her.

Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy were waiting in the foyer, surrounded by the usual splendor. Draco remembered it garnishing their importance like an emerald-encrusted sprig of parsley, but now it seemed to dwarf them. Things had changed. Life had changed. The world had changed. In the middle of this massive house, encircled by the products of their vast wealth, Draco Malfoy's parents looked only like they had something to prove. Like they were clinging to the vases and the statues and the portraits, to the gold and the silver and the polish, because it was all they had left.

Draco shook his head, and those thoughts obediently went away, skulking off into the back of his mind with their proverbial tails between their proverbial legs.

He realized that he wanted to cry "_Daddykins_!" and throw himself at Lucius, just to see what the man would do. Instead, however, he sidled a bit closer to Hermione, inclined his head a little, and said quietly, "Father."

The Iberian sun had not touched Lucius Malfoy's face, but a thousand new lines had spread from the corners of his eyes, cracks in the smooth white marble of his skin…

There Draco went, getting all depressed again. Maybe it was something about this huge, sprawling, monstrous maze of a house that did it.

Lucius Malfoy nodded back, and Draco turned to his mother, who looked substantially happier—possibly simply by force of will. Most people underestimated Narcissa Malfoy's formidable will. Such people had not seen her in action, when she was perfectly content to sulk, to sniffle, to sneer, to snarl, to snip, and generally to make life Hellish for everyone within a three-mile radius until she got what she wanted.

Draco had picked up most of his pleading techniques from her. The patented puppy-eyed, I'll-Die-If-I-Don't-Get-It Maneuver was his favorite. Hermione bought it every time.

"Don't be so formal, love," Narcissa told him, gliding forward to lay a whispery white hand on either side of his neck and brush her lips against his cheek. "Welcome home."

Draco managed a smile. There were countless memories in his head, batting insistent gossamer wings against the inside of his skull, images of moments of wonder and glamour and luxury, but they seemed to come from a different world than this one. He remembered brightness and brilliance, vibrant gemstones and swirling colors that persisted in his spinning head long after he'd laid it on a down-filled pillow. But what he saw—what he saw now—were whites, grays, and silvers; pallor and dust and silence. _When,_ Draco asked himself silently, _did my parents become ghosts?_

"This is Hermione," he said, stepping aside and indicating her with both hands. "Hermione Granger."

Speaking of Hermione, she looked like she'd just wandered into a cave full of snakes, and a boulder was being pushed over the entrance. Which was pretty much accurate, come to think of it.

Draco's mother took Hermione's hands in hers, smiling a little too enthusiastically. "Oh, wonderful!" she decided. "How are you, dear? Can I get one of the Elves to get you anything?"

Hermione's eyes went wide, and a bit of color fled her cheeks. Suddenly, Draco remembered all of that S.P.E.W. nonsense, and he had to fight the urge to remove his right shoe and utilize it to beat himself into unconsciousness.

"I'm fine," Hermione said, donning a slightly brittle smile, "but thank you."

Narcissa squeezed Hermione's hands gently. "I hope you'll be able to consider our home yours as well."

Hermione looked like she might rather go live with a clan of rabid, slightly radioactive raccoons. Or throw herself off of London Bridge. Or feed herself to the albino peacocks, one little piece at a time. But she smiled again and repeated softly, "Thank you."

Yup, Draco had damn good taste in women. If you ignored all of his choices up to Hermione, anyway.

"Might we talk to you for a moment, Draco?" Lucius cut in smoothly, motioning vaguely to a room down the hall and to the left. When Narcissa glided over to her husband's side and raised a banana-cream-pie eyebrow at her son, Draco decided that they were serious.

He set Hermione in a dark green armchair and leaned down by her ear to murmur, "It's like working metal. If there are any problems, I'll beat them out with a hammer."

She smiled, and he took that as permission to go chasing after his parents.

When Lucius said, "Close the door," he knew the shit was deeper than he'd realized. Time, he sighed to himself, to take a deep breath, put on his angling boots, and wade in.

"This is the one you talked about in the letters?" his father prompted, the old steel returning to his eyes. Lucius Malfoy's hair still draped long and thick over his shoulders, the transition from white-blond to just plain white barely detectable.

Draco glanced into the mirror to his right, the gleaming silver ringed by gleaming gold wrought into the form of two snakes, each guarding a half of the glass. His own hair had grown out a bit since the unfortunate day he'd cut it himself with his slightly rusty pocket knife (trying to gain a measure of anonymity, though setting a fashion trend in the process had been in the back of his mind), but it still looked less than stellar—and less than Malfoy-approved.

To be frank, it looked like crap, and it was falling in his eyes like nobody's business.

"Yes," he said. "This is Hermione." He wondered how many Hermiones his father knew, asking a question like that. It wasn't exactly the most popular name in the world.

"Isn't she a Mu—"

A tidal wave of anger surged in his chest. "Muggleborn?" he preempted.

Draco's father frowned, but what he said was, "Quite."

"She seems lovely," Narcissa put in, her smile only a little forced. It looked like she'd remembered what he'd said in the latest letter—that if they didn't want her in their lives, they wouldn't be getting him, either. Ever.

It was the first threat he'd made in a long time.

Making threats was like riding a bicycle, however; you never quite lost the knack for it.

"Narcissa," Lucius noted coldly, "after all these years—"

"—we might be wise to do as others have done and evolve," Draco's mother finished, a challenge and a merciless resolution in her eyes. "In case you haven't looked around lately, Lucius, there aren't many of us left."

"_Us,"_ Draco thought, hollowly. _As if we're different from "them."_

Narcissa's light blue eyes held Lucius's gray ones, a silent battle raging, and all Draco could think about was how pale they were—how pale it all was. He wanted to splash a sunset onto it, spray it with orange and pink and purple, add some Ravenclaw blue and some Hufflepuff yellow and some Gryffindor red to the stolid palate of white and forest green. Whatever Marina Granger might have thought, he _hated_ orange, but right then, he wanted to splatter orange paint all over his father's aristocratic face.

It was only moments later that his wandering eyes saw the explosion bursting in a blossom of flame just outside the windows of the foyer, and in the split-second between the staggering panorama and the deafening sound—upon the heels of which came the thundering shock that brought all the last of the Malfoys to their knees—Draco reflected that there was plenty of orange in the world after all.

Far too much, really.


	6. Tense

_Author's Note: Gueeeesssss what day it is! It__'s __GREEDY DAY! Thank Eltea, who calculated how many eons it was going to take to post this whole story otherwise._

_Be warned that my conclusion during the creation of this chapter was that writer's block equals death._

_Also, apologies if piñatas are mostly an American stolen tradition… I thought it was too good to miss. And I needed material… You have no idea…_

* * *

Chapter Six

Tense

Hermione woke up and stretched. She looked around. The sheets were pale gray; the comforter a deep green. She felt slightly debased, as if she'd taken a bath in water that wasn't quite clean, or watched the straight-to-video sequel to a Disney movie.

Slightly disoriented, not to mention mortified, she slipped out of the bed and went to the wide window, the lush emerald curtains of which had been drawn closed. Upon pushing them open, she discovered that the likely reason for this was not, as she had begun to expect, to strand her in the dimness, but rather because the windowpane was absent. There were a few shards of glass still embedded in the frame, pointing inward like demon's teeth slavering for human flesh, but that was about it.

She wondered what might have shattered the glass, and why, in a place like the Malfoys', the window would have been left in this state, and then her memory wandered back into her brain, saluted lazily, and tossed itself down in its fauteuil to light a cigar.

_Arrogant bastard,_ she thought vaguely.

Of course, remembering ducking away from what had looked like an explosion of epic proportions did not prepare her for peering down at the expanses of the lawn to discover that its verdure had given way to charred black.

"Holy mother of pearl," she breathed.

She had never stopped to think about how the idea of deifying a pearl undermined the attempt to avoid saying something blasphemous in the first place, and she wasn't going to do it now. There was far too much jaw-dropping to do, currently. It was a tight schedule of awe and amazement that didn't allow for much tangential theological contemplation.

Sticking her head out the lack-of-a-window, she saw that much of the wall was blackened, too, and that most of the other windows had also been obliterated. She hoped that the House Elves were all right, the poor dears. She also hoped, a little bit against her will, that the peacocks were. Admittedly, they were basically personifications of the Malfoy willingness to spend absurd quantities of money on absurd things with absurd regularity, but that didn't mean that any innocent peacocks ought to be reduced to burnt skeletons and a profusion of sooty feathers.

She was a good way towards having stared her fill at the scorched ground when she heard the door open behind her. A half-turn revealed the intruder to be Draco, which was an immense relief, given that it had looked like Lucius wanted to stamp her out with one shiny black boot, and Narcissa seemed to be trusting the rather slyer strategy of drowning her in apparent kindness.

"Hey," Draco noted. "You're up."

A little part of Hermione's brain cackled, _Say "No, really? Didn't know the Genius Guild was staying here, too"!_

It looked like Draco had been rubbing off on her.

Fortunately, she had retained her free will, and she gave the aforementioned little part of her brain a REJECTED stamp right in the kisser.

"_And_ about," Draco added, his hands in his pockets, his face straight, his tone impressed, only the spark in his pale eyes betraying his amusement. "It's a two-for-one."

Hermione took a step away from the window towards him. "Are the House Elves all right?"

Draco blinked at her. "I have no idea. I haven't checked."

He looked slightly frazzled, and his shirt was done up one button off, so the zeal in her next query was largely melodramatic. "How can you _be_ so heartless?" she demanded.

Draco smiled winningly. "Years of practice, darling," he replied brightly. "_Years_ of practice." When she shook her head, he added, "Don't worry. I think they can regenerate limbs and things. House Elves are damn hard to kill, take it from me."

"How do you know?" she inquired.

Draco paused.

"Don't answer that," Hermione amended quickly.

When the command prompted a sigh of relief from Draco, Hermione corrected herself again.

"Actually," she re-amended, "_do_ answer that."

Draco looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Well," he said slowly, "you know how at Muggle birthday parties, they have piñatas?"

Hermione nodded slowly.

Draco shifted his weight and looked at the floor before raising his gaze tentatively to hers. "Well, at Pureblood birthday parties, we have Elf-iñatas."

Hermione stared at him. She stared at him for a good fifteen seconds, during which time he fidgeted and avoided her gaze. "You can't be serious," she managed at last.

It was only then that Draco cracked a massive grin. "Of _course_ not!" he responded. His grin widened, which was a feat, given that Hermione hadn't thought it could _get_ any bigger. "I had you, though, didn't I? I had you _going_." He smiled to himself, blithely, but there was something else in it—something dark and slightly afraid.

By the afternoon light streaming through the broken window, Hermione looked at the room intently for the first time. She took in the mahogany dresser, the handles of the drawers silver set with green stones; she took in the silver mirror on the wall, framed with dark green; she took in the rumpled green and gray bedsheets and the bookshelf crammed full of textbooks and the green cushion on the window-seat against which she leaned even now.

Then she looked at the man before her, who was one object behind in his own series of looking, and she asked, "Is this your bedroom?"

His hands slipped into his pockets again, almost of their own accord. "Yes," he said. "It was."

The past tense was not lost on Hermione Granger. Few tenses were. She liked tenses. They were simple, consistent, and comprehensible. Unlike human beings.

Hermione decided it was time to fall back on the time-tested strategy for dispelling tension: rapidly and very blatantly changing the subject.

"Your shirt's buttoned wrong," she declared, nodding at the offending article.

Draco looked downward in a rather slapstick sort of gesture. "So it is," he agreed. He started to undo them all in order to rectify the problem, continuing, "My old one was the approximate color of corpse skin, so I deemed it meet to—" He stopped, looked up at her, tilted his head, and grinned. "Thought," he announced.

"How unusual," Hermione remarked lightly.

"You're telling me," Draco responded. "But it was a good thought. Know what it was?"

Hermione shook her head obediently, and Draco sauntered forward until they were only inches apart.

"It was," he told her, taking her hands and setting them on the front of his shirt, "that you should do this instead."

Hermione raised an eyebrow at him. "If I didn't know that you were an entirely upright, painfully prudish individual, Mister Malfoy," she replied, "I might think that was a come-on."

Given that an explosion had interrupted a strikingly awkward meet-the-parents moment, Hermione shouldn't have been too surprised when one more thing went like the movies and Draco kissed her.

She also shouldn't have been too surprised that the door opened moments later to admit one Narcissa Black Malfoy, who started out with a soft, "Is she awa—" and concluded with a slightly dazed "—_oh_."

Hermione had always kind of thought romantic comedies were overrated. Maybe it was better to keep her life distinctly separate from them.

Which was not to say she would have minded terribly having to make out with Hugh Grant on a balcony with a spectacular view of the London skyline on a starry night, or anything, but there were some places where you had to draw the line.

In any case, Draco looked mortified. "_Mother_," he managed to groan though the hands he had over his face.

Hermione sympathized. She had her hands over her face, too, and had utilized the gesture on myriad occasions, ergo she was quite aware how difficult it was to speak clearly through your palms.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Late lunch with the Malfoys was even more difficult after that bit of unparalleled awkwardness. Not only was Hermione loath to say anything about House Elves, she was loath to say much of anything at all, for fear that the conversation would be even worse than the silence. Her nervousness verged on nausea, which only made her think of S.P.E.W. even more.

She had never been too good with acronyms, and she'd gotten a good lot of crap for that one. At least she hadn't called it the House Elf Liberation League or anything. Honestly, some people had no sense of perspective.

"So," Narcissa said, her cheer ringing about as true as Hermione imagined an emphatic _I didn't do anything, Professor! _would coming from a young Harry Potter, "what is it that you do for a living, Hermione?"

Hermione had just taken a bite of whatever it was on her plate, which seemed to be the lovechild of an avocado and a leaf of mint and was the approximate color of toothpaste, and she had to get it down before she could reply—which was no small task, as the demon-food fought her every step of the way.

"I…" This slightly hoarse beginning of a statement after a few seconds of choking on whatever-it-was. "…run the Department of Magical Law Enforcement."

There was a long silence.

"…Do you indeed?" Narcissa managed then.

Hermione nodded.

Lucius considered her, his eyes slightly hooded. "What policies are you planning to endorse?" he inquired.

Hermione kept her mouth shut, knowing that if she didn't, she might end up spewing something about S.P.E.W. on a nation-wide scale and kicking her one and only chance to impress the Malfoys while it was down. And then grinding its face into the pavement with her heel. And then possibly cackling maniacally as her last tenuous links to sanity snapped.

It seemed quite plausible. _Likely_, even.

"Father," Draco interjected in the nick of time, just before Hermione said something about House Elf freedom and werewolf rights and other humane sorts of things, "I think it is generally acknowledged that there are three topics that should not be broached in polite conversation." He sat up straighter and ticked them off on his fingers. "Religion, sex, and politics."

Lucius raised a pale eyebrow, but he dropped the question—and dropped his gaze placidly to his plate, where he picked at his own portion of demon-food, not looking to find it much more appetizing than Hermione did.

Hermione, for her part, stifled a sigh of pure relief. Maybe she had a chance of surviving this encounter without Draco's parents hating her down to her Muggleborn core after all.

"So if you don't talk about politics," Draco added contentedly, "then we won't bore you with the details of our steamy sex."

Well, so much for _that_.

Hermione triumphed over the urge to bury her flaming face in the dubiously-edible teal concoction smeared on her plate, but only barely.


	7. Foolproof

_Author's Note: My brain goes on strike a lot. With picket lines and everything. Sometimes I have to call in the riot police._

_And sorry about the blatant racism. It passed the Eltea Incredulous Laughter Test (EILT, not to be confused with BLT), so it made the cut._

_I also have not attempted the insanity within, so I have no personal experience. Please, please, please, for the love of ALL THAT IS HOLY, don't try this at home. Draco is a trained and professional idiot. He's got a framed certificate on his wall._

* * *

Chapter Seven

Foolproof

Hermione was indulging. Draco kind of absently wished she would indulge in something normal, like peanut-butter-chunk ice cream. Or even, you know, chick flick marathons.

No, Hermione Granger indulged in intense sessions of freaking out.

"_They hate me_!" She had her hands over he face, then buried in her hair, then over her face again. "_They want to kill me_! _They'll track me down and beat me to death with the cane with the snake head on it_!"

"As impressed as I am with your creativity," Draco remarked, "they won't."

Hermione gave a sound that seemed to combine all the worst parts of a sigh, a cry, a scream, and a howl. "_They will_! _I showed up, got offended by their traditions, spent four hours unconscious, got soot all over your bed, and then choked on that—stuff—that we were eating and almost died_—"

"You thought that mush was poisonous, too?" Draco mused. "Maybe the Elves are on strike…"

Hermione plunked down in one of the kitchen chairs and put her face down on the table. "Maybe my _brain_ is on strike."

Draco, who had been loitering in the doorway watching the freak-out take place in all its slightly-insane glory, joined her at the table. "Hermione," he said, "let me tell you something."

She looked up. There was still a smudge of soot on her forehead, and what looked to be a trace of the whatever-it-was they'd been served for lunch had perched on her cheekbone. Draco did not know how it had come to be there, and he wasn't sure he wanted to find out.

"If it came down to you or them," he informed her, "I would choose you eight days a week."

Forlornly Hermione blinked at him. "Three hundred and sixty-six days a year?" she asked hesitantly.

Draco smirked. "And three hundred sixty-seven on leap years." When Hermione blinked a little more, he set his hands flat on the table and met her eyes. "Look, I'll make an analogy my parents would understand. Would you pick the shiny, new Galleon, or the chipped old Knut someone's stuck to the ground with bubble gum?" He paused. "I'll also make an analogy _I_ would understand—would you pick the Triple Bacon Supreme from Cleon's, or that mint-flavored goopy crap we ate earlier?" He paused, considered the empty air to his right, and then corrected himself. "Pardon me, _tried_ to eat earlier, to little apparent success." That done, he focused on Hermione again, looking intently into the dark brown of her eyes, drinking in the soot and the goop and her wild hair and the little bit of fluff clinging to one of her eyelashes. "To me, Hermione Granger," he told her, "you are a shiny, new Galleon and no less than _four_ slices of Triple Bacon Supreme."

A bit faintly, Hermione smiled. "Galleons and pizza really shouldn't be romantic," she decided, "but they are now."

Draco smirked a bit more. He liked smirks. They were like normal smiles, conveying the same amusement and reigning in the same glee, but they were more cautious somehow. Protected. "Well, O Romanced One," he drawled, "what's for dinner?"

Hermione pursed her lips. "You did kind of give me a craving for the Triple Bacon," she divulged ruefully.

Draco grinned.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

That night, as he lay quietly, the bacon and his stomach duking it out emphatically, Draco Malfoy employed his capable brain to the task of wondering. He had a lot of things to wonder about, a few more to chew on his fingernails over, and a few that would probably require beating his head against a solid wall.

He could at least get some wondering done now.

He wondered if Sparky was going to stop sniffing his leg and get the shredding it over with. He wondered if there actually was a chance, however remote, that his father's pimp cane would be colliding with any craniums in the near future.

Mostly, he wondered why someone had tried to blow up Malfoy Manor.

That question didn't seem to have an answer, however, so he turned to one that might.

If the time came, if the final hand was dealt, if it whittled down to an ultimatum, would he really be able to drop it all, to let it all go, to leave it all to fall behind him—all the grandness and the grace and the _affluence_—if it came down to Hermione Granger or everything he'd ever known?

He looked at her where she lay, curled up by his arm, her cheek against his shoulder, the faint moonlight casting black silk shadows on her face. A spark of gold like a shiny, new Galleon winked in her hair for just a moment, and then it was gone.

Yes. He would.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Monday morning came with a bang—the bang of Draco's brain exploding.

The Aurors wanted more funding, more training programs, and cushier chairs in their offices. Draco had to agree with the training program bit. It was quite apparent to him that their current programs were severely lacking in instruction in basic mathematics, as they failed to teach the simple fact that money, contrary to popular belief, did not grow on trees.

Unless you were talking, very literally, about paper money, in which case it sort of did.

Draco's phone beeped the special beep it had for when Hermione was connecting their lines.

"Draco?" she prompted. "Do you think you could run and get me some coffee?"

"And how would you like your coffee today, Granger Goddess?"

"How are you having yours?"

"Black," Draco answered cheerfully, "like my heart. For you?"

"Black," she responded, "like my men."

Draco shortly found his desk right up in his face as he bent double, laughing hysterically.

"Was that racist?" Hermione asked sheepishly. The sheepishness rapidly became panic. "That was racist, wasn't it? It just came out… Oh, God. Oh, God, I'm racist. They're going to fire me. You won't tell anyone, will you? Will you, Draco? Draco?"

It took him about twenty seconds to catch his breath, after which point he sat up straight, took a deep breath, remembered what Hermione had said, and promptly dissolved into howling laughter again.

He was still wiping tears from the corners of his eyes when he stumbled into the break room.

There, in all his spotlight-smile-flashing, hideous-tie-wearing, slicked-wavy-hair-having glory, leaning against the counter and sipping from a Styrofoam cup, was Jonas Schaeffer.

"Draco!" the other man—if he even _counted_ as a _man_—greeted him cheerily. "I was just thinking about you."

This was roughly akin to being informed that the Devil had you in particular on his mind. Draco looked at the jelly donuts in a pink box on the counter, not far from Jonas's silk-shirt-sleeved elbow. He wished that one of them was Jonas's head, so that he could slam his fist down on it and watch the jelly squirt out all over the place and splatter on the grammatically sacrilegious "Pleas dont leave food overnite" sign.

Or was it jam?

To Hell with it.

"Hermione in a good mood?" Jonas was asking jovially. "I've got a meeting with her in a few minutes."

That put a hook right through the lip of Draco's attention. "Have you?" he said slowly. Jonas nodded and then beamed, and Draco tried not to wince and squint. "Excuse me, won't you?" he managed. Again Jonas nodded obligingly, and Draco sidled out.

He was getting very bad images—pry your brain out with a pair of tongs and scour the sides of your skull with a jack-o-lantern spoon and then clean up with a sponge images. Images of Jonas Schaeffer seducing Hermione right across her desk, whipping off his criminally unattractive tie and dropping it on the line of defenseless origami cranes by her lamp.

He ducked into the men's bathroom, feeling distinctly nauseous. When the door fell closed behind him, he sucked in a huge breath to release as a scream of primal rage and deep-seated anguish, but as he tilted his head back for better acoustics, he saw…

…the air vent.

_Thank you, Higher Powers,_ Draco thought. All he had to do was climb into the air vent and crawl to the branch over Hermione's office, where he would be able to see and hear all that went on, and where he would have an excellent angle for spitting onto Jonas Schaeffer's fat head. It was exceedingly simple.

Not to mention _foolproof_.

Less-than-gracefully, he clambered up onto the bank of sinks, gripped the steel bar that ran between the lights over the mirror, and reached out for the grille that covered the ventilation shaft. Felicitously, there was a tiny latch on his side of it, which, with some stretching and some flailing, he managed to undo, letting gravity pull the whole grille downward and leaving one Draco Malfoy a passage right into the duct.

Well,_sort_ of right into the duct.

He put his latch-undoing right hand against the opposite side of the hole to brace himself and then let go of the lights with his left hand and, in one precarious, toes-on-the-edge-of-the-counter swing, managed to grab onto the nearer side of the hole. With a hand on either side, he gritted his teeth and jumped off the counter.

Oh, his fingers hated him for that one. But they held.

Hanging now from the open vent, he had only to do a slightly unusual sort of pull-up, and then he could throw his torso into the duct, scramble the rest of the way in, and be off.

Easy, peasy, puddin', and pie. He'd done pull-ups on the shower curtain bar all the time over the summers in the olden days, as much to alleviate his boredom as anything else.

Unfortunately, it was more like, _Sleazy, queasy, envy, and failure_. It summarized the whole story, from Jonas Schaeffer, to his effect on Draco's gastrointestinal tract, to his effect on Draco's emotions, to the ultimate result as Draco, arms quaking, levered himself up with a sudden burst of energy, slammed his head against the top of the duct to a tinny _crash_ that probably echoed all through the Ministry, lost his grip, landed on his right foot, twisted his ankle, and crumpled dazedly to the floor.

He pointed one shaky finger at the gaping open panel, which seemed to be laughing at him—or was that the ringing in his ears?

"I hate you," he informed it. "You are a worthless, no-good, back-stabbing son of a bitch, and I hate you and everything you stand for."

The door opened, and Dynesy Cranot came in.

"'Morning." Draco didn't move as he offered the greeting, and Dynesy knelt next to him cautiously.

"'Morning…" Cranot began uncertainly.

Draco propped himself up on his elbows and looked intently at the newcomer. "Dynesy," he said urgently, "what do you think of Jonas Schaeffer?"

Pausing, Cranot examined the empty air in that perpetually-pensive way that he had. "I… don't… really like his ties," he decided at last. "But overall, he's a good sor—"

Draco sat up abruptly and threw his arms around the one sane man in all of the Ministry of Magic. "I love you, Dynesy," he announced into his new best friend's shoulder.

Tentatively, Dynesy patted his back.


	8. Awooga Takes His Due

_Author's Note: Don't ask me why the chapters are so much longer this time around._

_Psh, not like _you're_ complaining._

_As for all the people clamoring about the cause of the explosion, never fear. Everything will eventually be explained, and I'm certainly not spoiling anything now, no matter how many reviews you leave asking about it. Though your investment is touching. And slightly creepy._

* * *

Chapter Eight

Awooga Takes His Due

After Hermione, laughing, ushered Jonas back out of her office, returning his cheery wave as he started down the hall, she noticed the two cups of coffee on Draco's desk next to his Magic 8 Ball.

"Oh, you got it!" she noted. "Sorry, I got caught up in the meeting and all."

Draco looked up and offered a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. Before she could inquire about it, he had started speaking. "It's all right," he assured her. "It's probably still pretty warm. There was a line." He picked it up and handed it to her, and the slight coldness in his smile was gone, as if it had never been.

_Had_ it ever been?

"I'm afraid you're on your own for lunch today," she reported. "I'm meeting Ginny."

Eloquently, Draco pointed to the open page of her appointment book, where his usual indecipherable scrawl was, on this particular occasion, overlaid with pink highlighter. At Hermione's raised eyebrow, he explained, "It's Ginny's favorite color."

"Her favorite color is green," Hermione informed him.

"The fathomless emerald of the dashing Mr. Potter's eyes, perhaps?"

She grinned. "Presumably."

"Well," Draco concluded, crossing his legs and itching at his ear with the end of his quill, "you tell the unfortunately-named Mrs. Ginevra Weasley Potter that I send my salutations."

"They're still engaged," Hermione corrected. "They're working out the fiscal things."

"But I thought my man Potter was well-endowed," Draco said.

Hermione tried to frown and failed. "Nice," she remarked.

Draco grinned. "Oh, good, you got it."

"Yes," Hermione responded crisply, "and I think you should keep your filthy mind out of the gutter in the future." She started into her office, adding over a shoulder, "I'm sure Jonas would be willing to have lunch with you."

"I," Draco replied equably, "would rather hang myself with today's specimen of abominable tie."

Ah. Or, as a farmer who had a dog once said, _Bingo_.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

As Hermione was reassembling the contents of her purse, which she had spread all over the room looking for her good pen earlier, the door opened, and Draco stepped in.

She smiled. "Yes?"

Draco didn't waste any time in slipping his arms around her waist, drawing her over to the other side of the office, and backing her up against the wall to the right of the door. "Just wanted a proper goodbye," he told her. He then proceeded not to waste any time in applying his lips to her neck.

"Draco," she said, arching her back and stifling an appreciative sigh, "Jonas is—"

"The Necktie Demon of old mythology; I know." He laid a line of kisses up to her ear. "There are countless tales of the Necktie Demon seducing beautiful women and crushing origami cranes, after which he sucks the blood of the former and burns the latter in a great, swanky festival dedicated to Awooga, the God of Misery, Lameness, and Colorblindness."

"I was going to say, 'Nothing more or less than a work colleague,'" she replied, "but he does have rather poor taste in accessories, now that you mention it." She paused, Draco took the opportunity to nip the curve of her ear very gently, and the rest of her rejoinder came out in a rush as she tried not to melt into an unsightly Hermione-colored puddle on the floor. "And shouldn't Awooga be the God of Sirens?"

"Clearly," Draco commented, his mouth sliding along her cheekbone, "you haven't done your research." He paused and drew back just an inch—just enough to meet her eyes, raise a pale eyebrow, and smirk slowly. "Good thing I like you." It was only then, after all the buildup, that he took possession of her lips with his.

It lived up to the hype.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Ginny had arranged to meet at noon exactly, since Hermione only had an hour for lunch. At twelve-thirty exactly, Ginny arrived.

Hermione, who had been drinking water and trying not to snack on bread, packets of fake sugar, and Saltine crackers for half an hour, got up and hugged her anyway.

"I'm so sorry," Ginny was repeating. "We're getting new carpets put in Thursday, because the ones we have smell like someone died on them and they performed the autopsy on-site, and the guy called right as I was leaving, and the man would _not_ shut _up_; I even told him I was meeting with the Prime Minister, and he told me he was doing _his_ carpets on Friday."

"I find that to be a slightly dubious claim," Hermione decided, sitting again.

"So do I," Ginny agreed. "I think he really just needs to get a girlfriend. Then he could call _her_, and drive _her_ phone bill through the roof, and make _her_ friends wait half an hour for her." She took a deep breath and then brightened. "So! How's work?"

The one upside to Ginny's being late was that Hermione no longer looked quite so flushed and disheveled as she had when had first arrived. "Excellent," she answered, unable to keep from grinning. "How's the Gringotts stuff going?"

Ginny rolled her eyes. "We're still having some major difficulties with the sector you lot shredded with that dragon—"

"—_while_ we were saving the world as we know it," Hermione reminded her.

"Well," Ginny persisted, "you could've been a bit more careful about it, don't you think? Anyway, it's mostly cleared up, but every now and then, a beam falls on someone, and then it's all under suspicion again. Happened just last week, to Moody, actually."

Hermione sighed. "More kindling for his conspiracy theories, of course."

Enthralled with the menu now, Ginny nodded absently. "He thinks there're mine mites in the whole substructure. I think he's mad. Hence the nickname, I suppose. I've never even _heard_ of mine mites; maybe I'll ask Hagrid about it."

As Ginny flipped a page, her ring caught the light and claimed it, refracting it breathtakingly onto the plastic covering of the menu.

A thousand thoughts went through Hermione Granger's mind, and she seized upon the simplest and most harmless of their number.

As her mother had told her a thousand times, when eventually she _did_ manage to get the guy-and-grandchildren thing going, she should _never_ wear her diamond when there was the remotest chance she'd be around her kids. Mrs. Granger had had a friend who had accidentally cut her son's face with her ring, and the _instant_ Marina Granger had found out about her own pregnancy, she'd strung hers on a silver chain and worn it around her neck, just to get used to it for when it would really count.

And that was as much as Hermione Granger was going to think about diamond rings and lectures from her mother.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

When Hermione returned to the Ministry, she found it in a state of utter pandemonium.

Well, if that wasn't the story of her life. You left those fools alone for _one_ _minute_, and the next thing you knew, they were trying to burn down the whole building.

More literally than Hermione would have liked.

Jonas ran into her first. "Hermione!" he gasped. "We don't know what—just all of a sudden, the whole hall went up in flames! It's just—oh, Christ—"

A smoldering ceiling beam being blasted with jets of water from a few different wands crumbled and fell, and a wave of heat hit Hermione in the face.

People were coursing out of all the halls, out of the stairwell, out of the_elevator_, and she saw Tonks, her pink hair singed black at the tips, helping an older lady who was limping, and Andray Rachels looked like a raccoon, and the Minister—

She ran up to Pericles Tyrus, whose steel-gray hair was coated with ash. "What happened?" she shouted over the faint roaring of the flames in other sectors, as yet uncontrolled, and the keening of sirens growing louder by the second. "Were they after you?"

Tyrus's eyes painted a stark contrast to the fire—they were just as bright as their counterpart, but they burned sharp and cold against the nebulous scalding heat of the flames. "Three reasons why not, Granger," he told her. "First, a spell would be easier and less conspicuous; second, I'm not worth killing anyway; and third, it started in _your_ department."

Hermione stared at him for a moment, and then another thought struck her with the force of a laden freight train. Wheels, scraps of metal, and iron bars from the track soared into the air, quite possibly impaling passerby as they came back down.

"Draco," she whispered.

Later, all she could remember was a vague haze of squeezing through the milling crowds, barely feeling the elbows that bruised her arms and her sides, pushing people heedlessly out of the way, her heartbeat like distant thunder in her ears, and one word, over and over, drowning every logical thought, strangling them one by one.

_Draco_.

Someone grabbed her arm, and she pried the fingers loose and shoved the hand away, but the person's other hand caught her wrist, and he jerked her backwards—

"_Hermione_."

She spun and looked up into storm-cloud eyes.

Draco smiled a little. "You've got soot on your cheek again," he told her. "I guess the world has realized that it makes you look like an Amazonian warrior queen."

"And by 'like an Amazonian warrior queen,'" she hazarded unsteadily, raising a trembling hand to search her face for the intrusive material, "you mean 'like crap.'"

"And by 'like crap,'" Draco replied, licking his thumb and sliding it over her cheekbone, "you mean 'beautiful.'" He cupped her face in both hands and kissed her, and she might have heard Jonas Schaeffer gasp in the background, but she was a bit too preoccupied with dying of joy to be sure.


	9. The Good, the Bad, and the Really Drunk

_Author's Note: The hills are alive with the sound of music… With songs they have sung, for a thousand years…_

_Wait, WHAT? Dear God, how do we escape! Can we turn off the music? Then will they DIE?_

* * *

Chapter Nine

The Good, the Bad, and the Very Drunk

When the firefighters had come storming in, armed with hoses and experience and hopefully no knowledge of the fact that the little sticks in everyone's hands actually had a purpose, they and Tyrus had dispersed the huddling clusters of Ministry employees and sent everyone scuttling home. Now, lying on the bed in Number 78, hands folded behind his damp head, after an absurdly long shower complete with two and a half shampooings of his hair (Hermione having knocked on the door during the final one and told him that if he didn't get out, she'd eat all the chicken noodle soup herself), Draco still thought he could smell smoke clinging to his person the way that one distantly-related auntie of his with the dentures and the overpowering perfume clung to him at family functions.

He supposed that he couldn't be expected to deal with fire very well, given that he was, at the core of things, a coldhearted bastard. There was something of a risk of pulling a Frosty the Snowman Meets Mister Furnace.

Eventually, his brain tired of running in circles flailing its arms, and he slept. He dreamed more than once that he'd been set on fire. Then it was _him_ running in circles with arms flailing, rather than his brain.

It had always had a bit of a vindictive streak, Draco Malfoy's brain had.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

They got a call from Tyrus's secretary on Tuesday morning informing them that they didn't have to come in due to the reconstructive efforts, and while Hermione did a lot of chewing her lip and fingernails over not being present to help, Draco was mostly just relieved. He spent over two hours playing the Chase the String Game with Sparky, dragged Hermione to the grocery store, coaxed a laugh out of her pretending to snipe pomegranates with a banana, and then bought enough ice cream to make a personal trainer resign on the spot.

It was a good day, and, like all good days, it ended far faster than it should have. Draco figured it was the world's way of sticking its tongue out at anyone with the gall to try to enjoy himself.

When they walked into the Ministry on Wednesday morning, everyone was very subdued. Hermione went into her office, and then she stopped. Draco moved up behind her and peeked over her shoulder. She was looking at the rank of sticky note cranes by her lamp.

Or, rather, she was looking at what _had_ been the rank of cranes, and which was now more or less a slightly sticky-looking, vaguely linear wad of paper, melted by the malevolent sprinkler in the ceiling.

"They're dead," Hermione said in a small voice. "Your cranes are dead."

Draco paused. Then he remarked, "We'd better notify their next of kin." He went over to his desk, opened the second drawer, delved his hands in, drew out two handfuls of origami constructions, and sprinkled them on Hermione's head. "All ten thousand of them."

Hermione positively giggled, which was slightly weird and nonetheless vindicating.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Everything went pretty much as normal after that, excepting the charred sort of smell that had permeated the entirety of the Ministry. It wasn't until Friday evening that something rather unusual took place.

Draco was digging through the fridge singing "Hungry Like the Wolf," and Hermione was sitting on the couch trying to read the newspaper around Sparky's face and whiskers, which he was forcing into her field of vision at every opportunity.

"_In touch with the ground; I smell like I sound_—"

"Abysmal," Hermione contributed.

"_I'm on the hunt, I'm after_—" The phone rang. "Got it," Draco volunteered. He sashayed over to the phone and plucked it from the cradle, still swaying and reciting the words in his head. "Good_evening_, you've reached the Granger residence, such as it is."

"Heard that," Hermione informed him.

"Hi, Draco," a familiar, world-saving voice declared. "It's Harry."

"I thought I detected that do-gooder odor right through the phone," Draco noted. "Shall I get your partner in un-crime for you?"

"Actually," Harry said, "I wanted to talk to _you_." Draco could clearly picture Potter pointing a finger as well, just to add to the emphasis. "I was going to call Ron, too—what say you we have us a little Guys' Night Out?"

"Let me consult my boss," Draco replied. He put a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and poked his head out into the living room. "I'm going out with Harry and Ron," he announced.

Hermione raised an eyebrow at him. It was quickly obscured as Sparky sniffed her eyelashes. "All right," she conceded. "Have fun. And don't be surprised if all the ice cream's gone when you get back."

"Not even you could eat _three_ containers of Fudge Ripple," Draco scoffed. He put the phone to his ear again. "All systems are go, Captain," he reported. "I'll be on your doorstep, trying to look through the peephole backwards, in a matter of moments."

"Sounds good," Harry decided. "We can try Ron when you get here."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Armed now with his coat and his credit cards, Draco, loitering near Harry in the Potters' kitchen, could hear the ringing on the other end of the phone, and, shortly, could also hear Weasley's voice—quite clearly, in fact.

"Hullo?"

"Hey, Ron," Harry greeted him cheerily. "Draco and I are going to go have a good time at the bar; you interested?"

"Sorry, mate," Ron replied ruefully. "Ilsa's had a bad week, so I'm making dinner. And I rented that movie."

"What movie?" Harry prompted.

"You know. The one with the boat."

There was a pause.

"'Titanic'?" Harry ventured.

"That's the one!" Ron confirmed triumphantly. "Well, another time, maybe. You two have some good, clean fun. Get hammered for me, yeah?"

"Can do," Harry replied blithely.

"And will," Draco added.

Draco Malfoy had always thought that anything worth doing was worth overdoing to the point that it became hazardous.

As Harry shouldered his coat on and they stepped out into the brittle frostiness of the air, Draco considered.

"What does Ilsa do, actually?" he asked.

Harry scratched his head, his fingers disappearing in the ebony expanses of his unruly hair. "She's a fashion consultant," he answered.

Draco paused. "So… what does she… _do_?"

Harry also paused. "You know," he said, "I haven't the faintest idea."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Not too surprisingly, it didn't take long to lose Mister I-Saved-the-World-at-Seventeen.

They were lounging against the bar, just out of range of the mess of disturbed and disturbing dancers gyrating to something that might just have been music, come to think of it.

"Let's get drunker still, Potter," Draco suggested to his companion, poking at the other man's chest insistently with an index finger. It had a bit to do with the non-music, truth be told. He kind of wanted to block it out. "Let's get _wasted_. Let's get_soused_. Let's get _arrested_."

"You're leading me astray," Harry realized. The revelation had come just a_bit_ too late. About three drinks too late. "You _cad_. When I get home and upthrow—chuck up—whatever it is—all over the new carpet, I'm holding you accountifiable."

"Fair enough," Draco acquiesced cheerfully. "Can I get you another one of those?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Harry was laughing very hard. He pointed to something over Draco's shoulder.

"Hey!" he laughed. "Hey, I've seen that guy somewhere! I don't remember where, but I _know_ I have, you know? Crazy when that happens, innit? Like someone just walked over your grave—tap-danced on it! Like someone just did that one bit from _Riverdance_, with the—" Harry began imitating 'that one bit.' Poorly.

Draco did not bear witness to much of this stunning performance, as he was too busy staring in horror at Arturo Leonine brooding over a beer on the adjacent face of the four-sided counter, which trapped its barkeeps in the hollow middle.

Harry peered at Leonine as well. "Where've I seen him?" he wondered.

"When you prevented him from killing me," Draco explained, somewhat tightly. "Which I'm grateful for, by the way. Jolly good show and whatnot." Leonine started to turn his head. "_Down_, Potter!" Draco hissed, shoving his companion to the floor and ducking low by the bar, leaving only his eyes and forehead above the countertop. Even as he watched, Leonine pushed his bottle away, stood, and started moving off through the crowd, liberally implementing his elbows when necessary.

Draco glanced at Harry—who was sitting contentedly on the floor, staring interestedly off into space—grabbed his arm, and hauled him up.

"Come on, Potter," he urged. "We've got some potentially life-threatening snooping to do."

"Really?" Harry asked excitedly. "I'm good at that! There was this one time, at school, when I was—I was—what was I doing? I dunno, but I found this three-headed dog, and it almost bit my _head_ off, and then it was really important later on! It was like Deus Ex Machina!"

"Precisely why I'm bringing you, Potter," Draco noted, dragging him across the dance floor. "You're like an improbably-good luck charm."

He caught glimpses of tarnished gold hair shot with silver and flashes of a ratty gray coat between the shifting, swirling forms that darted around him and around each other. Harry was laughing faintly and drunkenly again, but Draco ignored him—or, rather, jerked on his arm every time he got tangled up with someone else.

"Come_on_," he gritted out, yanking hard as a young woman wearing far too little clothing—if you could call it "clothing"; it looked like the cataclysmic collision of a failing leather factory and the shrapnel from an explosive impregnated with silver chains—slung her arms around Harry's neck.

Just after he'd extricated his friend from the clutches of that catastrophe-waiting-to-happen, they managed to escape the fringes of the dancers—which, as Draco had discovered, was where all the freaky types congregated. The especially freaky types, that was. Draco saw a back exit door falling slowly shut.

By the time he and Harry had burst out into the dank alley to which it led, there wasn't so much as a trace of one Arturo Leonine.

"Gone," Draco murmured, rubbing his chin. It was rather a good thing that Potter was irretrievably intoxicated, or he might have bestowed upon his Guys'-Night-Out-mate the esteemed title of 'Captain Obvious.'

Harry rubbed at his chin as well, possibly just to feel included, and attempted to focus hazy eyes on his companion. "Soooo…" he began. "What'cha gonna' do?"

Draco sighed and patted him on the shoulder. "I'm going to get very, very drunk," he answered.


	10. Silver and Green

_Author's Note: It is astonishing how much of this fic was written after midnight on a variety of days. Perhaps that explains the fact that portions of it exhibit what I call "Very Early Morning Humor," which is what most people call "Nonsense and Idiocy."_

_Sorry I've sucked so much at replying to reviews lately… I still love all of you!_

_And I apologize for any vocal cords strained by screams of anguish during/after this chapter._

* * *

Chapter Ten

Silver and Green

Hermione was sitting primly on the couch, Sparky at her right, with all the lights off. She had been sitting primly on the couch, Sparky at her right, with all the lights off, for four hours now.

A key turned in the lock, and Hermione clenched both fists, forgetting that she'd set one hand on Sparky's back. Accordingly, the cat fled.

Draco backed in, fighting the key out of the lock again, and stumbled a little. He was singing softly.

"_Good mornin', good mor-nin'; it's great to stay up late; good mornin', good mor-nin' to you_…"

"Where have you been?" Hermione inquired coldly.

Draco turned, blinked, and flicked the light-switch on. He then recoiled from the nearest lamp, which was telling to say the least. "I… have been… out," he announced at last, nodding to himself.

"You're drunk," Hermione noted icily.

Draco nodded again, helpfully. "Yeah, but you should've seen Potter—I had to carry him into his house, and I totally hit his head on the doorway, and—"

"Stop," Hermione ordered.

He did, obligingly, but only for a moment. "You're so pretty when you're irrationally angry," he told her.

"I am quite _rationally_ angry, Draco," she spat. "You leave saying it'll be a few drinks down the street, and you come back at four in the morning unable to string a sentence together?"

Draco shrugged, smiling absently. "Din't mean to make you worry."

Hermione fought the knot in her throat—fought it tooth and nail. She wasn't going to lose it now. There was far too much at stake. "That's the _problem_," she snapped. "Intentions aren't everything, Draco Malfoy. You've got to _think_ first. You've got to _think_ about what other people want, and what other people are going to feel. You've got to consider how what you're doing will affect other people." She felt her rage ebbing, leaving her as tired and desolate as might be expected at four in the morning after a workday and a night of worrying hard.

"It's all part of my strategy," Draco said.

Her eyes narrowed. "What strategy is that?"

"My coping strategy."

"Getting sloshed is your coping strategy?" Hermione summarized incredulously.

Draco smiled a little more yet. "Yes," he said, his voice slurring only slightly.

Hermione covered her face. "I don't believe this. I don't believe it. I _refuse_ to believe it."

Gently Draco pried her hands away. That done, he proceeded to plant a few slightly clumsy kisses on her face. "So melodramatic," he murmured.

She shoved at him. "_Eugh_—your breath—"

"—smells like flowers and wintergreen and happiness."

"Not_quite_, Draco."

"Come on, love, just cut me a little slack—"

"A little slack?" she repeated, hearing a strident note in her voice as she tore herself away from him. "Yes, of course. And then I'll cut a little more, and a little more, and pretty soon, I'll have cut you loose, and there'll be another girl, and you'll do the same damn thing _Ron_ did, and _then_ where'll I be, Draco Malfoy?" Tears threatened her voice, but she pushed them away, just as she pushed everything away—out of sight, into the dark little corner where she kept all the emotions and fears and doubts and hopeless prayers that she couldn't bear to examine in the light of day. "Then where'll I be, when you've gotten tired of me, too?"

Draco sighed, rubbing at an eye. "Hermione—"

She turned her back. "No," she said. "I'm not having this argument when you're drunk. I'm having this argument when you're wide awake and thinking, and then you'll have to hear me. Goodnight, Draco."

She shut her ears to the pleas that issued forth, strode down the hall, entered her bedroom, and locked the door behind her.

Only then did she fall down onto her bed and bury her face in her pillow.

Seeing Draco sprawled out on the couch wrung her heart almost dry as she slipped through the living room the next morning. Two, she had decided, could play at his game—she was going out. She didn't know where, or for how long, and she didn't care. All she knew was why: Because he ought to know how it felt for once. Because somebody besides her should have to hurt for a change.

The house coffee at the little shop two blocks down was warm and rich, and Hermione sat nursing her cup, looking out the broad window at the quiet street, for a long time. Long enough to watch the Saturday morning crowd bustle out of their homes and towards the shopping district; long enough to regret the mere four hours of sleep she'd obtained the night before; long enough for her coffee to be very cold by the time she set it down and went out into the street herself, burying her hands in the pockets of her coat like she wished she could bury the memory of the desperate plea in Draco's unfocused eyes.

She did more ogling of displays than actual shopping, and the day crawled by like a crippled snail on an uphill slope. As her stomach whined about food, drink, nourishment, and other trivialities when she glanced at all the happy people chatting over lunch at the street-side cafés, she almost ducked into a phone-booth and called Ginny. Or Ilsa. Or both. But if she called them, they would see it written on her face in silver and green, and they would get a confession out of her if they had to resort to medieval torture devices.

Hermione wasn't up for a confession. What she wanted was for the next police box to be the Doctor's TARDIS, so that she could travel back in time to a moment when she didn't feel like something inside her had rolled over and died.

It would have been much too depressing to sit at one of those cheery tables, right across from the moving Christmas displays in the big stores' windows, all by herself. She judiciously decided to skip lunch. The unadulterated patheticness of braving it alone would have made her throw her food up again anyway.

She almost cried when she realized that she had just made up a word.

The night did not sneak up on her. Rather, she watched it fall, piece by piece, second by second, one faint star blinking into existence at a time, as she learned the sidewalk with her shoes. A waxing moon rose, the silver, it seemed, of tears.

_God,_ Hermione thought. _ I should never get depressed. This sad-poet persona is extremely unflattering. Come on, it can't possibly be the "silver of tears." Tears aren't even silver; they're transparent._

She peered at it a little more, squinting now. No, not tear-silver. The shadowed craters and basaltic maria were the dark gray of his pajama shirt, and the highlands were the pale gray of his eyes.

_Well,_that_ worked,_ Hermione thought acridly.

All of this really just made her want to throw herself off a bridge. A small bridge, though, so that either she'd live, albeit horribly maimed, to give Draco the biggest guilt trip of his young life, or the fall to her death would be short enough that she wouldn't have time to regret jumping in the first place.

The streets were almost entirely clear now, but she didn't want to go home. She didn't want to see the signs of him draped all over the life she'd tried to make for herself, the parts of him indelible and inevitable and absolutely inseparable from who and what she was now.

The moon continued to draw her gaze to it even as she continued down the street. It was very high, very distant, and very cold—everything she wanted to be right now.

She tore her eyes away with no small effort and looked at her feet for a while. Then she looked up again, and the stars mocked her, too. She imagined they had shrill, squeaky little voices, like the frighteningly-long list of children's television icons that she had always thought were on helium, crack, or possibly an elaborate cocktail of the two.

Was it really only a month ago that he'd dragged her to dinner, dragged her out past the suburbs, dragged her up a hill, and flopped down on his back and pointed? Only a month ago that he'd told her to lie down and look for Draco, only to cry "_Here I am, silly_!" and kiss her instead when she finally rolled her eyes and complied?

Was it really only three days ago that he'd showered her with origami cranes and grinned like an eight-year-old who'd won the class spelling bee?

The idiot. The wonderful, beautiful, lovable _idiot_.

When she heard the telltale whisper of wood over fabric as someone drew a wand, she spun, but it wasn't fast enough.

"_Confundo_!"

Hermione had time for three last coherent thoughts.

The first was, _Aw, crap._

The second was, _What kind of crappy last coherent thought was that?_

The third was, _Do I have a fixation with the word 'crap,' or what?_

It was about then that everything became crappier still. Unimaginably crappy, in fact. And Hermione wasn't even conscious enough to process the crappiness as everything made one sudden, blurry rotation and then came back into focus twisted and with half the color leached out, like a photograph splattered with water.

Her thoughts came in a mutilated, truncated, nonsensical rush, and her ears rang.

_silver_

"—silver—"

_dark green coats dark gray pants black cloaks_

"—sure?"

_cloaks shadowing their faces_

"—do it _now_—"

The world spun, with her at its axis.

_black alley silver sidewalk black alley silver sidewalk_

"—_absolutely_ sure?"

And then—

_cold hot freeze burn silver red_

"—good, now let's—"

Go.

_red red red red red red RED_—

The silver sidewalk rose abruptly. Hazily Hermione saw her hands splayed out on it, holding her weight. She stayed there, it seemed, for a long time. An eternity, perhaps, to gather her wits again.

There was a migration of sticky, unpleasant warmth outward from the Land of Searing Pain that had arisen in her midsection. Putting one of her shaking hands to it, she used the other to push herself up, resolved to walk to one of those not-TARDIS phone booths after all. At the first step, she staggered, her low heels like inverted pyramids balanced beneath her feet, her head whirling, her eyes watering, her heart pounding so hard she expected it to rupture—

"My_Heavens_, dear," a familiar voice declared, in a hand-over-heart kind of tone. "What in the world's happened?"

Dazedly Hermione managed to find Lychorida Bolton's bony shoulder and latch onto it like a mussel onto a coastal pinnacle of granite.

You knew things were bad when Hermione Granger was making similes like that.

"Please," she panted. "Have you got a car?"

"Well, yes, dear; right over he—"

"You've_got _to take me to my friend's house." Hermione found herself seeing nothing but a haze of dark silver wet sidewalk and light silver moist sky and forced herself to focus on the face swimming in front of her.

Lychorida's eyebrows drew together, sending folds rippling across her forehead. "I should think you need a hospital, dear—"

"_No_," Hermione insisted. "It's _got _to be—got to be—" She caught her breath and coaxed the last few words out. "Harry Potter's house."

Lychorida's brittle fingers closed surprisingly gently around her wrist and began guiding her away. "Does he live nearby?"

"Yes—close enough—the address—"

It was a good thing Hermione had perfected the art of multi-tasking in school. Writing a Transfiguration essay, studying for Charms, and deflecting a bout of intended plagiarism from Ron and Harry all at once had been excellent practice for what she was doing now: walking towards Lychorida's dark green jalopy, covering the spreading bloodstain on her shirt with her hand, reciting an address, and largely holding herself together by force of will alone.

She would have been pretty impressed with herself if she'd had time.


	11. The Beginnings of Panic

_Author's Note: I is loves you guys. Yes. (nods sagely)_

_As long as you don't ask questions like, "Wait, they're ALIVE??"_

_Incidentally, I actually know a girl named Andie, short for Andrea. On the highly-remote off-chance that she's reading this, HI, ANDIE!_

* * *

Chapter Eleven

The Beginnings of Panic

Draco Malfoy paced.

He paced all the way to the edge of the kitchen, turned, moved in between the coffee table and the couch, and proceeded almost to the bedroom wall, where he turned again and went back. Sometimes Sparky darted at his heels; sometimes he fidgeted and folded his hands in front of him, or behind his back, or set them on his hips. He had been pacing for a long time.

Hermione had been gone when he had woken up. He had concluded, fairly naturally and despite the persistent ache in his skull, that she was mad at him and had departed to shop a little and cool off. But as the afternoon had progressed, an insidious tendril of anxiety had wormed its way into his heart, and gradually he had succumbed to the beginnings of panic.

Eventually, he had called Ginny. She would be the first to know anything, and she didn't hate him. Or, at least, not too much.

The tail end of the conversation had imprinted itself on his brain; he could hear every inflection in rhythm with the quiet thumping of his feet on the apartment carpet.

"If she's angry with me," he had said, "that's fine. That's perfectly fine. She has every right; she's entitled; I _know_ I did something wrong, and her being angry makes the best of sense. But—but Ginny, please, if she tells you not to tell me anything, _please_, just let me know she's there—or anywhere. That she's _somewhere_. She can _be_ angry; I'll let her, as long as she wants, as long as she needs, but I have to know—" He'd heard himself floundering, fumbling, failing, and had been powerless to raise his voice above a whisper. "I have to know she's safe."

There had been a slight pause that had stirred panic in his chest. Was Ginny against him, too? Were they _all_?

"Of course," she had replied softly. And it was there that he started to dare to hope that everything might end up all right.

The brilliance of that hope had faded, however, with the darkening of the crisp December evening. He had heard nothing in two hours, and night was falling fast. He did another lap around the living room.

And then the phone rang.

He had seized it before the end of the first ring, tearing it from the cradle, slamming it against his ear.

"Hello?" he pressed urgently, some negligible part of him hoping it wasn't Hermione's mother.

It wasn't.

A deep breath was drawn and then released on the other end. "She's here," Ginny told him.

Something in her tone froze all the blood in Draco's body. "How—is she?"

There was a pause, and all the ice cracked at once. "You'd… better come…"

He had Apparated right there, leaving the phone dangling by its cord.

Boy, if _that_ wasn't going to jack up the phone bill.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Potters had a nice, modest house. One entered into a short hall, which opened out into a living room, the bright, airy kitchen off to the right, another hall to the left presumably leading to bedrooms and a bathroom or two. But Draco didn't see the umbrella stand by the door, or the intricate Oriental rug on the floor, or the Christmas tree settled in a corner. He saw only Hermione Granger lying motionlessly on the couch.

He didn't remember moving, but he made it from the doorstep to the chair someone had set by the couch one way or another. Hermione's eyelashes were black against her bloodless cheeks, her thick hair in disarray—well, more disarray than usual. Her breathing was shallow but consistent, which was roughly akin to adding a teaspoon of sugar to a glass of vinegar.

_Drink up,_ Draco thought weakly.

He looked to Ginny desolately. "What—"

There was a knock at the door, and he started in surprise. Harry hasted over to the door and drew it open, revealing the dim silhouettes of three and a half people.

The first person was a four-year-old boy wearing a royal blue coat, his white hat, blue-striped and complete with a blue pom-pon, falling off to reveal feathery turquoise hair as he ran across the room. Ignoring Draco entirely, he paused in front of the couch, looking grave, and then turned to the second newcomer.

"Daddy," the boy said to Remus Lupin, "I like Hermione. Make her better."

Lupin seemed even more tired than usual as he folded his ragged coat over his arm and smiled wearily at his son. "I'll see what I can do, Teddy," he promised.

Draco kind of wished that his daddy had looked at him like that. Even just once.

The very idea, of course, was Malfoy Brand blasphemy, available at a family tree near you in all your favorite flavors.

The third figure was a magenta-haired, scarf-wearing Nymphadora Tonks—or, rather, Nymphadora Tonks Lupin. The remaining half-figure was the little girl sleeping with her blonde head on Tonks's shoulder, whose hair looked as soft as her brother's and peeked out from beneath her pink hat in delicate butter-yellow curls.

Lupin looked to Harry, his expression presaging the birth of a few new lines at the corners of his eyes. "What happened?" he inquired.

Draco suspected that the query was also code for, "Why the Hell did you call _me_?"

"We don't really know," Ginny answered from where she was attempting to help remove Tonks's coat without disturbing the sleeping child. "She came in, said something about werewolves, and then collapsed on the floor."

A deep line like a gouge mark appeared between Lupin's brows. "The full moon isn't for another four days," he informed them. He seemed to direct his next question at Ginny, which was unsurprising given that the once-Weasel seemed to have taken command of the situation. "Can I see the wound?"

Freeing Tonks from her sartorial constraints, Ginny came over, her lips pressed together, and peeled back the blanket covering Hermione from toe to chin. Draco almost fainted, died, or did something else equally humiliating and incapacitating when he saw what the action revealed—that was, two huge slashes in Hermione's abdomen, ruthless and ragged around the edges. It looked like Ginny and Harry had stopped the bleeding and removed the worst of the fabric of Hermione's clothes, which were shredded all around the circumference, from the site, but it was still a knee-weakening, mind-blowing, heart-stopping mess.

And the second he caught sight of it, Draco had snatched up a curious Teddy and covered the boy's inquisitive brown eyes. Lupin shot him a grateful look before diving into the diagnosis.

"These are knife wounds," he told them all quietly. "Then again, any werewolf can hold a knife just as easily as can a human."

"So she won't end up like Bill?" Harry blurted out.

Silence fell for a moment, thick, cold, and cruel. Draco clung to Teddy like a life preserver.

"No," Lupin confirmed quietly. "Or like me."

"I'm—sorry," Harry managed, his voice slightly strained. "I didn't—mean…"

"It's perfectly fine," Lupin replied, offering a smile that mostly just looked tired—so, so tired. "You did some independent study in healing, didn't you?"

Nodding mutely now (if that wasn't an improvement, Draco didn't know what was), Harry moved forward and started putting that study to use. To give him some space, Draco got up from his chair and moved away a little, with an angle permitting him to watch Hermione's face. He still had Teddy draped on him like a rather heavy, slightly-squirming necklace, and perhaps that was why Lupin joined him and said what he said next.

"Early on," he began softly, "as Ron and Ilsa first started dating, she spent more and more time with us—helping with the kids, playing with them, finding an endless supply of excuses to come over, to have somewhere to come _to_. But when the marriage took place, and Harry went with Ron, she stopped calling and stopped coming to the door. We couldn't get a thing out of her, and suddenly her excuses were always taking her somewhere else." Then he smiled, with the little glimmer in his eye that he'd used to have when he reached the crux of a particularly good DADA lecture. "On the first of November, we received a Christmas card from her, and she needed three additional handwritten pages to explain how wonderful you were."

Unfortunately for his emotional stability, Draco had forgotten that Remus Lupin had an uncanny ability to say things that made you so happy and so bitterly sad at once that you wanted to cry until your eyes shriveled up and fell out. Draco had always wondered if, when an episode of shriveling and falling out actually occurred, Lupin then proceeded to stomp upon the heretofore-eyeballs. Why else would he say the sorts of things he said, unless he had some kind of eventual goal?

Tonks had sidled up next to her husband, and now he could see their daughter's little angel face. He wished, hard, that there were some Higher Powers out there, one way or another, angels or otherwise, who would look down at this moment and realize that, whatever else had happened and would happen, Hermione was worth saving.

"What's her name?" he managed.

Tonks smiled. "Miranda."

"_An_die," Teddy corrected, mesmerized by the buttons on Draco's shirt, with which his tiny fingers were toying relentlessly.

"Andie for short," Tonks explained.

Teddy nodded sagely, and Draco raised a hand to touch his wonderful hair. It was anchoring.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Draco spent the night in the unforgiving wooden chair that the Potters (or, as Hermione would have corrected, Potter and his yet-Weasley fiancée) had provided. The whole room seemed unforgiving, from the red cushion yet-Weasley forced under his stunningly shapely rear end; to the warm, cushy rug beneath his feet; to the dim, slightly preternatural, star-like luminescence of the Christmas lights on the tree. The night went by slower than a crippled tortoise on a treadmill, and Draco spent it watching Hermione's eyelids, her hands, her face, the sole comfort her soft breathing, weak but regular. Harry and Ginny tried to get him to eat something, but he wouldn't; tried to get him to drink something, but he wouldn't; tried to get him to get up from the chair at all, but he wouldn't. Eventually, he did concede to go to the bathroom, but only with a somnolent Harry's repeated assurances that the other man would monitor Hermione closely until Draco returned.

He had been holding out a bit of hope that the moment he left, everything would change, but nothing did.

The Lupins had long since departed, Remus having promised to check in again the next morning, and, just past two, Harry and Ginny retreated reluctantly to bed, bolstered by Draco's quiet promises that he wouldn't move.

He didn't know why they doubted it. He wasn't sure he knew how to _breathe_ properly anymore, let alone get up and go anywhere.

The tortoise lifted one slightly arched leg after another and proceeded. The silence hung low and humid, cut only by the voice of the relentless clock in the kitchen, the faint buzzing of the nearby lamp, and the respiratory duet performed by the room's pair of occupants.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

He was in the same place the next morning when Harry and Ginny woke up, checked in, and mutedly attended to breakfast. He was still there a quarter of an hour later, when Remus arrived.

Lupin took one look at him and stopped halfway through the process of hanging his coat on the rack. He let go of it, and the article slipped off and crumpled to the floor like a body deprived of bones. Instead of moving to pick it up, Lupin came over to Draco.

"A word with you?" he asked softly. When Draco nodded and stood, Lupin drew him further into the living room, nearer the Christmas tree and out of earshot of the Almost-Potters. There he crossed his arms and paused. "Have you slept?" he inquired. Draco shook his head, so Lupin went on. "When was the last time you ate?"

Dizzily, Draco considered, his memories darting away to the far side of his mist-ridden skull, giggling hysterically and evading his grasp "I think… I had… some peanuts when Harry and I were out getting wasted…"

Draco had not realized that people _actually_ slapped their foreheads until he saw Lupin take that exquisite opportunity to do it.

_How very interesting,_ he thought.

Then the black tide in his head swelled, rose, and engulfed him, and he swayed once before dropping to the floor, enveloped by the unfriendly dark.


	12. The Dangers of Desperation

_Author's Note: You know what I love?_

_Um… me neither._

_Ten points if you catch the very tiny _Good Omens_ homage._

_And I think Jane is an awesome middle name, and I am of the opinion that Hermione and Umbridge sharing it bears a dose of literary power that JKR somehow failed to observe. Nyah._

* * *

Chapter Twelve

The Dangers of Desperation

"Extreme dehydration," a quiet, slightly hoarse voice was sighing.

"We tried," a familiar female voice with an unfamiliar quaver replied.

"I'm sure you did. I doubt it helped."

"Not in the slightest, the little _git_—"

"Ginny. He can't even fight back."

"Sorry, Remus."

Hermione opened her eyes. The room was dim, the ceiling unfamiliar, the blanket draped over her pleasantly warm. She was lying on a couch, and the voices originated from a place behind it.

When she tried to sit up, however, there was a flood of searing pain in her midsection like Hell on fire with choking sulfurous clouds and a few vindictive, pitchfork-wielding demons thrown in for good measure.

Or perhaps for evil measure, given the circumstances.

Whatever the case, she heard herself give something between a cry and a groan as she abandoned the endeavor.

"_Hermione_!" Ginny gasped, her footsteps scrambling nearer, her face coming into view.

"Back and better than ever," Hermione lied.

There was a moan from behind the couch.

"_Never_… _eating_… _peanuts_… _again_…"

"I doubt it was the peanuts, Draco," Remus noted.

"They were pretty salty," Harry cut in.

Remus paused. "I think this is a pointless topic of debate."

Momentarily, he had coaxed Draco to his feet and guided the staggering blond over to the chair by the couch, where said blond sat looking very pale and very bewildered.

It was the fact that his mouth wasn't motoring at eighty miles an hour that really scared Hermione, however.

"Now," Remus said. He went over to his coat, which was lying on the floor by the door, and retrieved from one of its pockets a chocolate bar of epic proportions. He returned to the cluster of people around the couch, unwrapped it, and broke it in half. One part went to Draco, one to Hermione; and then Remus Lupin licked his fingers absently. "There," he concluded.

Hermione was a tiny bit skeptical until she started eating. Her very blood felt thicker and richer, and she _saw_ color coming back into Draco's cheeks as he inhaled his portion like a pale vacuum cleaner.

Remus, his hands on his hips, looked very satisfied.

A bit of breakfast (with, at Remus's insistence, chocolate milk) and a few attempts at dissuasion from Harry and Ginny later, Hermione sat up, stood up, and went for her coat. She was fairly assured that she was quite healed, though the possibility that her willpower simply outweighed her infirmity certainly existed.

Yeah, that was probably it.

"I'm fine," she insisted, gently refusing the swarm of hands that arose to help her. Remus, apparently unconvinced, disappeared into the kitchen, presumably to seek more chocolate, just in case.

"Are you ready to go, Draco?" she inquired, half over her shoulder. "I have some files I need to look at tonight."

"You can't possibly be intending to go back to work tomorrow," Draco said.

Hermione looked at him. "How many meetings do I have?"

"Well, five, I think, but—"

"And what are those people going to do if I don't show up?" she inquired pointedly.

"Well, they can go screw themselves, or possibly each other, but—"

"But _what_, Draco?" she interrupted. "I have to be there." She shrugged her coat on.

"_Hermione Jane Granger, you get back in here_!" Draco howled.

She turned. "Draco," she said, "you sound like my father. Which is dancing on the line between Electra complex and just plain _weird_."

"Hermione Granger," he said, "you have lost your mind, which is a pity, because it's an excellent one. Sit down and get better. Be responsible."

"Draco Malfoy," she retorted, "after the way you spent _your_ Friday night, you're hardly in a position to tell _me_ to be responsible."

"You know what—" he started.

"_What_, Draco?" she interjected. "I know what you did, and I know how incredibly inconsiderate it was, and I can't think of anything else I ought to know."

"How about knowing that I'm _sorry_ and getting _over_ it?"

Remus stepped back into the room just as she was drawing in a breath to shout back, his smile shining and a little too wide, three huge, festive, chocolate incarnations of Santa Clause in his hands. "Who's up for a little bit more?" he asked cheerfully and a bit too loudly.

Despite herself—nigh on involuntarily—Hermione took some.

Okay, took a _lot_.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Draco, of course, was no match for a woman with a mission. Both he and Hermione were back at work bright and early Monday morning, her gritting her teeth to grin through the persistent throbbing in the area of her injury, him sulking about the fact that she wouldn't listen to any of his self-proclaimed worthy advice. She wanted to show him and his worthy advice a strategic finger, but that wasn't very appropriate workplace behavior, so she refrained.

Two meetings came and went, Draco orchestrating them masterfully despite the sniffy tone of You-Know-I'm-Right in his voice, and Hermione treated him cordially enough, though more than a hint of You're-Not-What-You-Are-Is-Stupid probably came through in hers.

It was like they were at school again, only some of the psychotic teachers were working for _her_ now.

When lunchtime arrived, they sat across from each other in silence for a full five minutes. Hermione was not going to be the first to speak. To speak was to surrender, and she was fighting to the death on this one, no matter how many soldiers would lie strewn across the bloodied field because of it. She was going to hold the high ground with her dying breath. Bayonet in hand, she would shoot deserters on sight—no regressing, no retreating, no surrender. Bullets might fly, blood might splatter, intervention from sane people like Ginny and Harry and Remus might take place, but—

"We're being retarded," Draco announced, well before she'd finished with the elaborate imagery she was crafting in her head.

"I believe they prefer 'differently abled' nowadays," Hermione informed him, slightly stiffly.

"Then they shouldn't mind terribly if we borrow 'retarded,' for us," Draco replied equably. "Love, I'm sick of this, all right? I was wrong to do what I did, but I never intended to hurt you by doing it, and I'm sorry that that happened."

Hermione took a deep breath. High ground—bayonets—moment of truth—

"I'm sorry I was a total bitch about it," she heard herself sigh.

Well. So much for that battle. And that elaborate image.

But Draco's face lit up like an electric lantern, and then his mouth went off like a racecar again, so clearly everything was all right.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Hermione glanced at her wall clock, with its open, round white face and simple black numbers. It was two minutes ahead, and it read _5:02_. She then consulted her desk clock, a little fold-up one that also displayed the temperature, the air pressure, and a fair amount of other useless data. This particular specimen of timepiece was three minutes ahead, and it read _5:03_ (and twenty-three seconds, but Hermione didn't tend to quibble over those).

The warm, vaguely fuzzy idea of a job well done, like a worn coat that had conformed to fit, settled over Hermione and tugged a little smile into being on her face. There was something uniquely satisfying about finishing a successful day at work, knowing that a quiet, relaxing evening at home with Draco and Sparky and the no-longer-orange couch lay ahead. It was like the last moments of the Titanic would have been, had the iceberg been a great, hulking mass of cotton candy heralding the entrance to Fairy Land instead of an astronomically massive chunk of ice that would signal the miserable doom of thousands of innocent people.

Hermione paused. She shook that very morbid conceit out of her head. And then she pressed a finger down on the button on her phone that connected it to the one on Draco's desk.

"Are you ready?" she asked, leaning in over the speaker.

Hermione was expecting some incarnation of "I have been for a while"—be it "I've been ready since eight this morning," "I've been ready since I was born," or "I've been ready since the word 'ready' came into common usage."

What she received was silence.

She hesitated, then jammed the button down again. "Draco?" she prompted.

Nothing.

Her hands were shaking as she threw her things into her bag and shouldered it. It was nothing. He'd gone to deliver something. He'd gone to talk to someone. He'd gone to get frozen yogurt, which he was going to spill all over his shirt and moan about until she _Tergeo_-d it off for him. Everything was perfectly normal. Everything was under control.

Everything was not under control.

It took her ten minutes to scour their part of the building. The huddled figures having a conspiratorial discussion near the fountain—there were always two or three of them; she suspected it was a Ministry mandate—looked at her warily and a little disdainfully as she barreled past, but she ignored them. She ignored just about everything. She wanted Draco, and she wanted him now.

By five-fifteen, she was flushed, harried, disheveled, and absolutely desperate.

Desperation, as everyone knows, is a very, very dangerous thing.

The Hesperides had just gathered their hot-off-the-runway bags and were about to clickety-clack their way out when Hermione caught them at their adjoining desks.

"Have you seen Draco?" she demanded. If anyone was going to be paying him an undue-to-the-point-of-being-unnerving amount of attention, it was them.

"I thought his name was _Ardoc_," the redhead remarked, her voice airy with an edge of spite, as she retrieved an emery board from the depths of her gold purse and swiped absently at her already-perfect nails.

Hermione had gotten her panting under control enough to frown. "I wouldn't have come to you if it wasn't important," she told them.

"Oh, so we're important now?" the brunette inquired, her poison-apple-red lips drawing into a thin smile.

"If we're so important," the blonde cut in, "why'd you tell Dynesy Cranot that if we were in your department, you'd fire us all in one go?"

There was a pause.

"I… never said anything like that," Hermione said slowly.

The brunette smacked the blonde on the arm. "_We_ made that rumor up, remember?" she hissed.

The blonde's eyes widened. "Oh, yeah…" Blissfully she smiled. "That was a good one."

Pursing her lips now, the brunette considered Hermione, who shifted her weight uncomfortably. "We saw Draco leave, if that's what you're wondering," she announced.

Hermione vaguely registered the fact that her fingers had clenched around the back of someone's chair. Fortunately, said chair was unoccupied, or its inhabitant might have been rather disturbed. Her knuckles went white. "With whom?" she pressed, breathlessly.

They stared at her.

"Ohmigawd," the redhead murmured. "Did she just say 'whom'?"

"I thought only, like, college professors said 'whom,'" the blonde whispered.

"That, and, like, Shakespeare," the redhead whispered back.

"_Will you stop analyzing my grammar and tell me_?" Hermione cried.

The brunette sighed and flipped her voluminous hair over her shoulder. "He left with some bloke," she yielded.

"What kind of 'bloke'?"

The brunette shrugged elegantly. "I don't know. Some old-ish bloke. On the ugly side. A little scruffy."

Hermione had a very bad feeling that she knew exactly who that extremely ambiguous description indicated.

Or, rather, _whom_ that extremely ambiguous description indicated.


	13. Outlook Not So Good

_Author's Note: I almost made a comic for this chapter to illustrate some leftover dialogue. Then I remembered that I can't draw._

* * *

Chapter Thirteen

Outlook Not So Good

People who said such things tended to say that you learned something new every day.

Today, Draco had learned that being under the Imperius Curse was an extremely unpleasant experience.

Sure, there was the whole passivity, and the feeling of being utterly released from all senses and incarnations of responsibility, obligation, and action, and that was kind of nice.

For five minutes, maybe.

Once those five minutes had elapsed, it was just a matter of struggling and fighting and writhing without _actually_ doing any of those things. It was like having all your nerve endings severed in one go. Draco was hard-pressed to figure out whether it was more deeply infuriating or deeply unsettling. He couldn't move. He couldn't resist. He couldn't even _blink_.

On the subject of the lattermost issue, his eyes were really starting to burn.

He supposed he was fortunate that he was still breathing, one way or another.

So it was that he felt something of an influx of gratitude when Arturo Leonine sat him down in a wooden chair, bound him to it with a quick, deft _Incarcerous_, and released the curse.

Well, 'gratitude' being a relative term.

A _really_ relative term.

"So… what the Hell am I doing here?" Draco inquired—rather politely, he thought, given the circumstances.

Leonine folded his strong, potentially-neck-breaking arms across his chest, his face darkening. "You're certainly not here for your conversational abilities," he responded crisply.

"What, then?" Draco rather liked his conversational abilities; he wasn't sure why _else_ anyone would see fit to keep him around.

Though Leonine probably wasn't much for scintillating repartee, come to think of it.

"I'm going to kill you." The other man was picking at a fingernail now.

Draco stared at him. "Well, why?"

"Because I hate you."

"That's not a _motive_."

"Yes, it is."

Draco looked at Leonine shrewdly. This was all very odd: the picturesque little cottage of a house, with its tattered oriental rug and its plastic-covered couches and its beaded lampshades; the pervasive smell of cat and stale perfume; the faintness of the flickers of interest on Leonine's unpleasant face.

_And _what_ an unpleasant face, ladies and gentlemen, _Draco thought. _A face even a mother couldn't love, no matter how hard she tried._

"Hating me is not a motive," Draco repeated.

Leonine shrugged. "It's fun, too."

"Killing people is fun?"

"Very much so. Especially when you do it nice and slow."

Carefully, Draco licked his lips. It was time to put his highly-touted, greatly-extolled, all-around amazing brilliance to work. He took a deep breath and channeled about eighty percent of his grand intelligence into the next sentence. It was a winner; he was sure of it. It had to be.

"I think a bit of therapy would do you a world of good," he said.

Leonine snorted dismissively.

Well, there went Plan A. Time to move on to Plan B. Or, rather, time to invent Plan B, in order to have a Plan B to move on to.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Plan B was not coming along well. In Draco's defense, it was somewhat difficult to engender and enact a Brilliant Master Plan the Likes of Which the World Has Never Seen when you were being killed nice and slow. Or slow_ly_. Or some equally mysterious adverb.

In addition to cat and stale perfume, the acrid, metallic scent of blood had permeated the heavy air. Draco found its fragrance especially striking, as the source of said blood happened to be his left nostril, making the staggering scent of the outpouring just about impossible to miss.

He really should have seen this whole fiasco coming. He had been playing with his Magic 8 Ball that afternoon, and he had asked it if he would have a good day. With its characteristic casual fatalism, it had replied, "Outlook not so good." Draco had wondered idly what that was supposed to mean. Probably, he had decided, that Hermione was going to volunteer to do dinner and then burn everything, and they'd sit at the table and howl with laughter, and when they regained their breath, they'd call for a pizza, and…

No, when Draco saw the mystical message that was "Outlook not so good," he should have known instantly and for a fact that those four words were intended to mean, "Well, your old enemy is going to perform an Unforgivable Curse on you, take you to some doting old cat lady's abandoned home, and then attempt to kill you one rather injurious blow to the face at a time."

Draco had always thought Magic 8 Balls should be more specific.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It had been a good day, too, after lunch, anyway.

When he'd seen Ginny coming down the hall, he'd moved to press the button to page Hermione, but Ginny had put a finger to her lips and then waved him over. Making sure she could see his raised eyebrows, he went over to her.

"Is there some place we can talk privately for a minute?" she asked.

Draco considered his usual hideouts. "How about the men's bathroom?" he supplied.

Ginny looked at him.

"We could try the break room," he suggested.

"Better," she decided, but when he peeked around the doorway, Jonas Schaeffer was once again lurking by the donuts. Draco hoped idly that he'd choke to death on one of them, then returned his attention to Ginny.

"Negative," he reported. "It's not safe."

Ginny thought for a moment. Then she pulled him down the hall and dragged him into a broom closet, jerking the door shut after them and plunging them into darkness.

There was a pause.

"Well, _this_ is awkward," Draco noted.

"It's not awkward unless you say it's awkward," Ginny countered.

Draco gave her a moment. "I just did," he reminded her.

"How do you know I heard you?"

"Because you just acknowledged it…?"

"Shut up." There was a faint rustling noise, and then a "_Lumos_." By the light of her wand, Ginny she found the chain to the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. When she pulled it, electrons surged through the wiring in the walls, darted into the bulb, buzzed through the tungsten filament, and flooded the closet with yellow light.

It was like _magic_!

Ginny extinguished her wand and jammed it back into her pocket, and then she folded her arms and looked at Draco. "I wanted to talk to you," she said, "about Hermione. You have to be careful with her. When she gets hurt, she doesn't let it go. She ends up obsessed with it, and she centers her whole world around it until she pushes everyone away, just to prove that she doesn't need the people who hurt her in the first place. And if you let her, she'll shut you out of her life." Ginny paused and looked at the floor of the closet, which seemed to be the place where latex gloves and unidentified sticky liquids went to die. "I did. And I lost her." She looked up at him, her dark eyes almost black in the shadow of the stark single light bulb. "And it was the worst thing that ever happened to me." She peered at him more closely still. "I listened," she stated slowly, "when you two argued. And it was good, as much as arguing can be good. You didn't lash out at each other, and there was humor in it. But you've got to be _so_ careful, Draco. That is the worst way in the world to lose someone you love—losing her to _herself_."

There was another pause, and then one of Ginny's ginger eyebrows flicked up. "I meant all of that," she told him, "in an entirely platonic way. Just in case your twisted Slytherin brain had other ideas."

Draco considered. "Now that you mention it," he said, "you, me, and Hermione in a threesome does not sound at all unpalatable."

"You're _disgusting_!" Ginny squealed, punching him mercilessly in the chest, yanking on the light bulb's cord once more, and then emerging out into the hallway again. Draco followed, and, by some miracle of God, there was no one present to see them skulking around in closets like snogomaniacal teenagers dodging Filch at Hogwarts.

He kind of liked that—"snogomaniacal." That was a good one.

They returned to Draco's desk, where he told Hermione of Ginny's arrival, and then the two, chattering away already, started off for ice cream. Ginny turned to give Draco one last glance over her shoulder, her eyebrows raised in a reprimanding sort of way.

As clearly and distinctly as possible while grinning like a madman, he mouthed, _Threesome—think about it!_

The hyperbolically-disgusted, kind of gargoyle-looking face that Ginny made in reply spoke volumes.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"This is getting old," Draco informed his captor. "If you're going to kill me, just kill me and be done with it."

He wasn't sure when he'd attained this entirely unprecedented level of utter stupidity. Calling a man's bluff when the man in question clearly wasn't bluffing gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "bad idea."

Leonine turned from where he'd been muttering to himself vituperatively about jugular veins this and shattered kneecaps that and looked right at Draco. In those wide, granite-green eyes, with their pinprick pupils and their cold, cold, relentless gaze, Draco saw a capacity, a willingness, and—better still—an _eagerness_ to inflict great pain.

Well, even more great pain than had already been inflicted, that was.

Leonine leaned over and, with the deliberate care of a man who knew what he was doing, closed five unyielding fingers around Draco's tie. Then, using it, he pulled Draco forward, tilting the chair to balance precariously on its front legs, and, per its design, Draco's tie became something of a noose.

He chose that moment to unbend his knee and kick Leonine where it counted.

An experienced murderer really should have thought to bind a victim's legs, too. Not that Draco was complaining, or anything.

He stomped on Leonine's wand where it rolled idly on the floor, its owner rolling on the floor nearby and howling in anguish, and when the fragile wood snapped, the spell that had trussed Draco's torso to the chair disappeared, freeing one Draco Malfoy, aristocrat, to go tearing out the door as fast as the limits of human exertion allowed.

In a dignified sort of way, of course.

The Iron Maiden song stuck in his head really wasn't helping.

_Run to the hills…_

_Run for your li-i-ives…_

The street was silent—which was good, because there was no one to see him galloping through the suburbs splattered in blood embellished with bruises, and which was also bad, because there was no one to give him a ride to the nearest phone booth. Thus it was that he was highly disheveled and panting hard by the time he found one of the coveted giant boxes, into which he dived as if it might make him invisible.

Which would be cool, but only for a little while, after which it would get boring.

The kitten-themed clock in the Cottage from Hell had read five-fifteen, and by now it was probably closer to five-thirty. He called the apartment first, and no one picked up. He left a message that was composed only of the compound word "BuggerHellshitdamnIhateyou," and then he tried Hermione's office. The phone rang once… twice…

Busy signal.

After barely resisting the urge to smash his forehead through the glass of the booth wall, Draco hung up and tried Harry.

Also busy.

If they were talking to each other, he was going to kill them both. As messily as possible.

Being a wizard without a wand, he decided, was like being a chicken without a head: There was a lot of running around in circles and bleeding involved, and not much else fell within the realm of feasibility.

Draco didn't have much change left—in fact, it was nothing short of a canonization-worthy miracle that his picking-shiny-things-from-the-sidewalk habit had paid off so well—so it was time to make one final phone call.

He bit his lip, swallowed his pride (which hurt like Hell, seeing as how it was approximately the size of Mount Everest), and dialed the number that belonged to the Weasleys.

He wasn't sure whether to be distraught or relieved when the Weasel himself picked up.

"Hullo?"

Sadly, there was no time to mock him.

"Hello, Ron. A favor?"

There was a pause.

"Say again?" Ron prompted.

"I asked," Draco repeated, slowly and more clearly, "if you could do me a favor."

There was another pause.

"Do you a favor?"

"Yes, Ro—"

"You mean," Ron interrupted, "like the kind of favor where you'd be at my mercy and owe me your life, soul, and monetary savings?"

Draco closed his eyes, considered strangling himself with the phone cord, and then took a deep breath. "Yes, Ron," he confirmed pleasantly. "That kind of favor."

Ron cackled.


	14. Humungoid

_Author's Note: Why? Because._

_It's kind of funny to me that 'Her and Me' was the sixth fanfiction I'd ever started. This was the nineteenth. Wow. I… need a life. Little bit._

_(If you've started counting, many, if not most, didn't make it past the conception-of-an-idea stage, so I'm afraid it won't add up…)_

* * *

Chapter Fourteen

"Humungoid"

It was a good thing that telephones couldn't complain, because Hermione's would have been throwing a hissy fit. With it at her ear, she'd risen to the verge of screaming, subsided to the brink of tears, and covered everything from desolation to excitement to insanity. And that was just in the last five minutes.

"Hermione," Harry reiterated patiently, "you cannot make a Marauders' Map of all of Britain. It's impossible. The scale is just too big, and things are constantly changing."

"But at Hogwarts, the _staircases_ move," she protested. "Why should this be any different? It's bigger, is all."

Harry sighed. "Well, you'd have wanted to get started on that… ah…"

"Half an hour ago?"

"I was thinking more like half a decade."

Hermione was seriously considering breaking the phone in two, just to make herself feel better, when there was a knock at the office door. "Hold that thought," she instructed Harry, after which she put the phone down, stormed across the room, jerked the door open, and started to say, "Can you tell time or not?" when she was rudely interrupted.

"Sorry about that," Draco reported, blood caking on his face, his shirt wrinkled, bruises blossoming purple just below the skin. "I got a little… tied up… by an old friend of mine."

Hermione stared at Ron, who was standing at Draco's right shoulder.

"Not _him_," Draco cut in quickly. "_Leonine_."

That pinned Hermione's attention to a cork board. "What?"

Draco nodded to the phone on her desk. "Who are you talking to?"

Hermione glanced at it. "Harry."

"Yes," Draco mused, "that would explain the busy signal…"

Hermione blinked. "Oh. Um. Sorry. We were trying to figure things out…"

Placidly, Draco moved over to his desk, opened the top drawer, and retrieved his wand. "It's all right," he assured her. "Ron and I negotiated. Now I only owe him my big Slytherin flag, likely so that he can burn it, and my first-born child, likely so that he can eat it." He looked at his recovered wand happily. "Not having this little guy is not only emasculating," he noted, "but also rather life-threatening."

"What…" Hermione managed. "…exactly… happened?"

Draco collected a few folders on his desk, selected a few papers, and tossed them into his Outbox. "Well, Leonine popped by, Imperiused me, dragged me off somewhere, and tried to kill me."

Hermione blinked again. "Then what?"

"Then I kicked him in a very tender place and ran like Hell. After which Ron had to rescue me."

"You're damn right I did," Ron put in contentedly.

"This is my story, Weasel-Boy," Draco cautioned, going into Hermione's office, hanging up the phone, and handing over her purse and her briefcase. "Let me tell it."

Ron frowned at him. "Just for that," he said, "I want your soul, too."

"Too bad," Draco told him, guiding a slightly dazed Hermione towards the exit. "I already signed your Devil's contract with my blood."

"Well, sign a new one."

"Not a chance, Ermine."

He opened the door and ushered her out.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

After listening to Draco's "BuggerHellshitdamnIhateyou" message and then one from Harry wondering why she had suddenly hung up on him, Hermione started attending to Draco's newest conglomeration of injuries.

"What do you want to do tonight?" she asked him.

He considered, made to look more forlorn than dashing by the cuts and bruises on his cheeks. "Mostly," he said, "I just want to sit down on the couch and watch that movie with the boat."

"What movie with the boat?"

"Uh… 'Colossal.' 'Humungoid.'"

"'Titanic'?"

"Right."

Hermione gave it a moment to sink in before she posed the obvious question. "Why in the world do _you_ want to watch _'Titanic'_?"

"Well," Draco answered equably, "when Ron was parading me around so that everyone and their mother would know that he'd saved me, he was telling me about how it totally worked for him and Ilsa."

"What was happening to him and Ilsa?" She hadn't heard about anything in particular…

"People were giving her a hard time at work," Draco explained, "which was really stressful for them, because Ron doesn't make all that much as a Quidditch Score Complainer—"

Hermione smiled a little. "I believe they prefer the term 'Sports Columnist.'"

"Same thing," Draco decided. "Anyway, because they're still paying off their mortgage and everything, they can't really afford for Ilsa to quit, and it was really straining their marriage and whatnot, and then Ron figured out that if every time Ilsa came home upset he put on 'Humungoid'—"

"'Titanic.'"

"Right. If he put on 'Titanic,' then everything kind of felt like it would work out."

Hermione tilted her head a little, considering. The whole thing would have been really touching if it hadn't involved, you know, _Ron_.

"Ginny and I should take Ilsa out to lunch," she realized. "I think that'd be really nice for her. It always seems to improve all that kind of stuff, you know?"

Pensively, Draco nodded. "Maybe I should take Leonine out to lunch."

One of Hermione's eyebrows rose. "He'd probably try to kill you."

Draco considered. "At least we'd be on familiar ground," he noted. He looked off into space again, or perhaps began to memorize the pattern of the bathroom tiles. He was sitting on the edge of the shower-tub, and she was sitting next to him, surrounded by a bevy of bandages and salves, trying to patch up the worst of what Leonine had done.

"Maybe you should buy him a copy of 'Titanic,'" she suggested innocently.

Draco thought it over a moment before shaking his head ruefully. "He'd find a way to kill someone with it. If it was a VHS, for example, he'd pull out the tape and strangle someone, and if it was a DVD, he'd break it in half and then use the jagged edge to slit someone's throat."

Slightly bewilderedly, Hermione blinked at him. "You're very morbid today," she commented.

Absently he nodded. "Getting your ass kicked will do that for you sometimes," he explained. "I wouldn't recommend it."

"Pity," Hermione replied. "So much for _my_ weekend plans."

"Speaking of weekend plans," Draco said, "the Weasel Duo is having a Game Night again this Friday. We and the not-yet-both-Potters are cordially invited."

"Will Ron still be after your soul?"

Draco thought it over. "I'd bet my life on it," he decided, "but he'll be wanting that, too."

Hermione had a feeling that Friday would be coming all too soon.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Perry Simons had written another inhumanly long and detailed report, and a place between Hermione's eyebrows was beginning to _throb_. As was a place at her temple, a place below her ear, and the spot right where her spine connected with her skull.

Maybe it was time to use the advanced set of administrative skills boasted by her overqualified secretary.

The overqualified secretary in question was bent over a sticky note, pale fingers moving slowly and intently to reinforce the creases.

"Draco—"

"Just a second, darling. I have nearly completed my masterpiece, and then all the world will tremble in awe of my artistic prowess."

Hermione raised an eyebrow, tucked Simons's report under her arm, and waited.

Monetarily, Draco leapt up from his seat, an intricate creature of little more than folds and imagination cradled in his triumphantly upraised hand.

"My magnum opus!" he crowed.

Hermione peered at said magnum opus. "What is it?"

He sat down again and placed it gently on his desk. "It's a frog," he announced. It looked more like a triangle with legs. "Look," he prompted. "It jumps." He pressed a finger down on the base of the triangle and then released, and the 'frog' made a forlorn sort of forward scuttle.

But Draco looked like a kid in a candy store, so she let it go. "Cool," she declared. She proffered the folder. "Trade you."

He held out his oeuvre obligingly, though he looked disappointed. "I think I just got gypped," he decided as she quite cheerfully swiped the frog.

"I'll add it to my menagerie," she told him.

"You're like the White Witch in _Narnia_," he sighed. "Except that you turn helpless animals to paper instead of stone."

"With an attitude like that," she rejoined pleasantly, "you're next."

Draco went into the duck-and-cover position beneath his desk. "I'm never coming out," he informed her.

"Did you bring the folder with you?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Good," she concluded. "Yell at me if you need some food under there."

She had only managed a step away before he called, "Can you bring me some chocolate?"

She sighed fondly. "How much chocolate?"

There was a pause as he pondered. "As much as you can carry," he answered. "Maybe get Dynsey to help you. The two of you could carry twice as much."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Ron looked like he was falling through the air and screaming. He was flailing both arms and one leg, and his mouth was as wide as it would go, which was a considerable measure.

Hermione was laughing more than was _strictly_ necessary.

"Uh… a skydiver?" Harry hazarded.

"You're jumping off a bridge," Ginny contributed.

"Fall? Autumn?" Ilsa attempted.

"Jesus Christ," Draco said.

Ron gave him a look, but Draco was staring at the window.

Following the line of his gaze, Hermione saw, like a beacon in the night, a skeletal white face pressed against the outside of the window pane.

Hands leapt over mouths and hearts, and then Draco surged to his feet and roared, "_STUPEFY_!"

A jet of red light seared across the room, slammed into the window, rebounded, and then hit Draco in the face. Draco promptly proceeded to crumple to the floor.

When Hermione glanced up at the window again, the figure was gone.

"Oh, son of a—Draco?" Harry was saying, shaking Draco's shoulder less than gently. "Draco, you stupid—"

"Don't finish that," Hermione cut in. She whipped her own wand out and, sighing, pointed it right at Draco's chest. "_Rennervate_."

Almost immediately, Draco sat up, which brought his forehead into a direct collision course with Harry's. Both cursed, glared at the other, and then rubbed at the afflicted area. Draco recovered first.

"Did you let him get away?" he demanded.

They all stared at him.

"Yes," Hermione confirmed.

"Well, why the Hell'd you do a thing like that?" he muttered.

"Possibly because you were passed out on the floor," Ron noted, a slightly snide note in his voice.

"At least I _tried_," Draco shot back.

"And _failed_," Ron snorted. "It was like one of those—the Three Tenors—"

"Stooges, dear," Ilsa corrected softly.

"Right."

"Who was that?" Hermione asked slowly before things could get completely out of hand. She liked to have things in hand. Preferably with her fingers tight around their necks, so that they couldn't get away even if they struggled.

"Uh, Voldemort?" Draco supplied, his sarcasm acidic. "How many pasty-faced creeps do you _know_?"

Ron opened his mouth to make a suggestion, and Hermione got the feeling that things were about to bite her fingers and run free when Harry stepped in.

"You guys," he said, "it can't be Voldemort. I definitely killed him. For good. This isn't like 'Halloween,' where you can decapitate him, and he comes back for the next movie anyway, inexplicably reattached."

"How can you be so sure?" Draco inquired.

Harry shrugged. "No scary music at ideal dramatic moments."

"Still," Draco murmured. "No one go into the basement."

"We don't have a basement," Ilsa piped up tentatively. "We have a bit of a crawlspace, but the serial killer would have to be bending down to move through it, unless he was very, very small."

"Okay," Draco said, putting one hand on his hip and holding up the index finger of the other for emphasis. "What we're looking for is a deathly-pale, highly-malevolent, window-lurking, crawlspace-infiltrating, serial-killing midget."

Ron stared at him. "Just how hard did you hit your head?" he demanded.


	15. Run Like Hell

_Author's Note: Last time, I had practically written all the pieces of the second half of the fic before I finished the first half, so I just had to put them all together, and I was done. That was not the case this time._

_Or that's my excuse, anyway… (innocent whistling)_

_And if charades is your favorite game in the whoooole woooorld… Sorry. I had a bad charades experience about half a decade ago. I guess it _can_ be fun, it just… isn't in my brain._

* * *

Chapter Fifteen

Run Like Hell

Draco Malfoy hated charades. He didn't find it boring; he didn't vaguely dislike it; he _hated_ it. It was very likely the worst game _ever_ invented by the accomplished race of Man, with the possible exception of bullfighting, which was just stupid.

_Hey, so we're going to poke the giant, horned, pissed-off animal with a pointed stick, right? And then we're going to RUN LIKE HELL._

But charades was pretty close.

After the passing-out-on-the-floor incident, which he was still attempting to reconcile in his mind—if by "reconcile in," you meant "erase entirely from"—Draco had, by some feat of humanity, managed to guess that Ron's prompt had been 'stuntman.' This was even more impressive if you considered that he had been _sure_ it was 'electrocuted octopus.'

So now it was his turn, which should have been fun and exciting and lighting up lots of creative neurons in his brain, and which categorically was not.

The Weasleys had a store-bought charades game, which offered you a tiny hourglass timer and a series of little cards with the words you were to act out printed upon them. The hourglass was sitting on the end table next to Ginny, all the sand at the bottom, where it had been sitting for the better part of half an hour, because no one had been able to guess Ron's, but no one had wanted to give up, either. This was one of the many reasons why charades was stupid.

The latest reason, and perhaps the worst by a slim margin, was that Draco was fairly well-assured that a long line of Malfoy forefathers were currently rolling over in their graves and slapping their decaying foreheads, because there was something horribly, deeply, irrevocably undignified about a Malfoy holding up tiny little stick-arms with two fingers extended as claws, pantomiming running around head-butting things.

Draco's prompt was _pachycephalosaurus_.

He was becoming progressively more convinced that someone extremely sadistic, possibly Hermione's mother, had written the cards.

Three excruciating minutes passed in this way before Ron burst out, "_Oh_! That—what is it—"

And then he uttered the immortal word—or one close enough to it that Draco was more than willing to give it to him.

"_Thank_ you," he sighed, flopping down on the couch next to Hermione again, quite prepared to go to sleep there, or perhaps to go into a coma. Cracking an eye open, he saw that everyone was staring at Ron.

Weasel Boy's ears went a vibrant, rosy pink. "Fred and George were big on dinosaurs when we were kids," he explained. "I thought it was cool because they thought it was cool."

Draco went back to trying to induce his own coma. One of many things his parents had never afflicted him with—siblings. The list went on to encompass other things he had been spared, including chores, a lack of self-confidence, a lack of attention, independence, learning how to respect others and their opinions, pets, arithmetic, and anything he complained about with much consistency.

His parents has been very accommodating people.

That, or miserably poor at raising children; it was a toss-up.

"Does that mean it's Ron's turn again?" Harry asked, his voice weary and slightly strained, as if he was Sisyphus, and the boulder had just rolled over his toe on its way down.

"Maybe we should play something else," Ilsa suggested gently. "We have… ah…" Draco's eyes were still closed, as he hadn't quite given up on the coma effort, but he heard the shuffling of Ilsa rifling through the game boxes stacked on the coffee table. "…_Scrabble_."

Draco sat up so fast his head spun.

"_SCRABBLE_!" he cried.

Immediately, Hermione was waving her hands like a traffic controller. "No _Scrabble_," she told the others. "Just don't. Draco makes up words like you wouldn't believe."

"You," Draco told her primly, "are aspersive, duplicitous, and _mendacious_."

There was a pause.

"Were those made-up?" Ron managed.

There was another pause.

"No," Hermione answered, a bit tightly. "Those were legitimate."

There was yet another pause, this one a _Tyrannosaurus Rex _to the other pauses' _pachycephalosauruses_.

"Maybe we should play _Twister_," Ginny murmured.

Draco's brain provided a nauseatingly clear image of him and Ron entangled very awkwardly over the plastic sheet, shouting obscenities at each other as the others looked on and winced. The awkwardness then perforce devolved into a fistfight. Which of course Draco won.

Of course.

By a landslide.

And looked incredibly sexy while doing so.

Ergo Hermione grabbed him by the lapels, dragged him into the kitchen, slammed the door behind them, locked it, ripped his shirt off, and—

"_Twister_ is kind of perverted," Hermione said.

_Damn it, _Draco thought.

"Um," Harry put in, "maybe we should just call it a night."

_Call it a pathetic _failure_, more like,_ Draco sighed to himself.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Saturday began late and dragged on, in that sluggish, languid way that Saturdays did. Draco draped himself over things in the manner of a blanket, immobile and vaguely warm, and Sparky joined him in his epic quest to cover a variety of available surfaces with his body.

His unbearably sexy body, that was. He wasn't above exerting ulterior motives even in a state of unparalleled laziness. He _was_ a Malfoy, after all.

He tried out the couch, the coffee table, the floor, and, briefly, the kitchen table, reluctantly sliding off of the lattermost at Hermione's urging only to discover that there were crumbs in his shirt.

The question of _how_ said crumbs had gained entry might well, he thought, fade gradually in the halls of memory alongside "What is the meaning of life?" and "What in the blazing _Hell_ possessed Albus Dumbledore to hire the likes of _Gilderoy Lockhart_?"

Sparky, for his part, explored the top of the television, the top of the refrigerator, the counter by the toaster, Hermione's kitchen chair (just as she was about to utilize this particular article of furniture, naturally), Draco's stomach, and Draco's face.

As uncomfortable as this final frontier proved to be, it made it quite clear that Sparky was a professional-grade layabout. Draco had to confess a bit of jealousy on that account; he was an amateur at best.

He also had cat fur in his eyelashes.

By the time evening rolled around, twilight settling the cool, hazy orange of a streetlamp in the night, Draco was so bored that he was ready to cut off his fingers and feed them to the cat, simply to have something to do.

"Take up knitting," Hermione suggested from behind the latest erudite novel.

"Don't mock me, woman," Draco reprimanded. "If anything, it would _surely_ be embroidery."

"Much manlier," Hermione agreed absently.

"Embroidery _while_ riding on a motorcycle," he elaborated. "While being chased by ninjas and Soviet stealth jets, as the applicable embroidery will reveal an ancient code at the heart of a government conspiracy."

Hermione glanced up from the book long enough to raise an eyebrow.

"I'm going on a walk," Draco amended.

"Have fun," she said, back to her book already.

"I will," he decided, "just to spite you."

"I'm not mad," she informed him calmly.

"Just to spite you for not being mad," he corrected.

She paused. "You don't make much sense."

"Good thing I'm the sexiest thing this side of Christian Bale," he noted.

"Oh, are you?" This with a detached air of vague curiosity.

"I'm leaving now," he announced.

"Be careful out there," she told him.

Propping the door open with a foot as he twined a dark green scarf around his neck, Draco scoffed. "_Please_. As if anyone would have the unadulterated _gall_ to harm the sexiest thing this side of Christian Bale."

He shut the door on her laughter, grinning to himself. A laugh from Hermione Granger vindicated even the persistent tabletop crumbs still migrating around inside his shirt.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The air was frigid, which was to be expected; the light was failing, also predictably; and Draco felt like a million bucks, which was odd for the circumstances but not for him in particular.

Hands deep in his pockets, as if plumbing their depths for precious metals, he drew in dizzying breaths of air fragile with the crystalline weight of the cold. As he strolled past the windows of the endless boutiques, shining glass eyes lined up against the sidewalk, he looked into them, some of them dark already, some giving him a view of a few straggling employees packing merchandise away. In his mind, he superimposed every dress he passed onto Hermione's body, which propagated detailed daydreams—or, rather, eveningdreams—about masked balls and cocktail parties.

Then he passed one of those alternative clothing stores, which was worth a shudder or eight. There was something horrible and enduring about the image of Hermione with a Mohawk, wearing fishnets, a corset, knee-high black boots, and not much else.

He was still trying to pry the thought from where it had plastered itself over the contours of his brain when he saw a flash of white out of the corner of his eye.

Adrenaline surged, instinct screamed, and Draco Malfoy ducked.

A muttered spell, and a truly nasty-looking one at that, hissed over his head.

A quick turn, coupled with a blind snatch for his wand, gave him his first decent look at his attacker—though a hood hid everything but the lower half of a pale face with a sharp nose.

"What did I _do_?" Draco demanded, just for good measure.

The other man didn't respond, but the wands came up immediately, and it was then that, predictably enough, Hell broke loose.

Not _all_ Hell, though. Probably just about eighty percent of it.

"_Crucio_!" his assailant cried. When Draco ducked—something at which he was becoming startlingly adept, which was significantly more useful than it was impressive—the hooded hoodlum shot off another.

"_Protego_!" Draco managed this time. He refused to spend the _entire_ fight rolling around on the ground. Honestly.

The shield fizzled under the next foray, a nice little number that would have severed his legs at the knee. Draco rather liked his knees. He was a bit attached to them, and he preferred it that way.

He jumped over the next spell, which was a nice change from ducking.

"_Expell_—" he began.

"_Sectumsempra_," the man with the cowing cowl interjected.

_Damn five-syllable Disarming spell,_ Draco thought as he darted out of the way once again. _Why couldn't it just be 'Gimme'?_

He deflected another one. "I am _not_," he shouted, "getting my ass kicked _twice_ in _one week_!"

The delicate dance went on, two white-faced specters twirling in the dark. Draco was ready to drop his wand and punch Hood Man in the face.

"Hey, asshole," he gritted out. He imagined that an eyebrow might have gone up, but the hood made it hard to tell. "Your mother ever tell you that it's rude to kill innocent people in the street?"

Hood Man shrugged.

"_Rictusempra_!" Draco crowed into the silence, wand pointed straight at Hood Man's partly-concealed face.

At the helpless peals of laughter that erupted, Draco kicked his heels and started down the street at a run. Wand clenched in one fist, eyes bright and burning a little in the cold, his shoes clapping like rippling thunder on the pavement, the air nipping at his lungs, he reflected that there was nothing quite like running like Hell to make you feel alive.

He'd gone a few blocks before he stumbled on both an uneven bit of paving and a belated revelation:

_You're a wizard, dipshit._

"Oh, yeah," Draco noted aloud. "Good call."

He swung his wand and Apparated.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"You _what_?" Hermione was gaping at him dumbly.

_How glamorous,_ Draco thought idly.

"I was attacked by a hooded albino," he answered calmly. "Though I suppose, given my immaculate ivory complexion, I'm not one to talk about a lack of melanin—"

"Aren't you just the least bit _worried_ about this?" Hermione prompted.

Draco considered. "Maybe the least bit," he decided. "Mostly, I'm just hungry."

He went over to the fridge and began examining its contents.

"We're low on strange juices and frozen pizza," he announced. "Can we go grocery shopping tomorrow?"

When there was no reply, he glanced at Hermione. She was still standing in the middle of the living room, staring at him.

"What?" he said. "A man's gotta' eat."

Especially, he noted, after running like Hell.


	16. Pardon My French

_Author's Note: I haven't used my French in… many moons. _Alors, je suis très désolée si mon français sera la merde absolute. Mea culpa. Perdóneme, por favor. Grazie.

_Heh heh heh heh heh… Yeah, I'm a dork. _Quelle surprise!

_Also, let the record show that I updated Wednesday at the usual time, and this cruel website decided to laugh in my face rather than sending out the alerts. It's the truth. I wouldn't lie to you. Or not about something as gravely important as FANFICTION._

_By the way, I'm a svelte, graceful blonde, five-foot-six, with lustrous hair and soulful blue eyes. Just so you know._

_Sorry about the immense quantities of filler._

* * *

Chapter Sixteen

Pardon My French

As Draco, the height and epitome of jauntiness, pushed the shopping cart up and down the tinsel-lined aisles, Hermione reflected that she had no idea what it was with him and food. Draco Malfoy didn't just _eat_ food. He _loved_ food. He worshiped it, worried about it, and selected it with the utmost of care. Every apple was paramount; every carton of eggs a quandary; every head of lettuce heroic.

Hermione mostly just ate things. Or had, before Draco and his food-centered religion, with its produce stand shrines and its supermarket temple, had come along. Once upon a pre-Draco world, after an epically bad day, she had slipped away to the coffee shop at midnight for chocolate, but that didn't _count_. Draco would have called it her alimentary epiphany (or something that similarly mixed cleverness and mild insanity), but it was only _once_.

Besides, Draco slipped away and came back with chocolate twice a day at work alone.

The food freak himself was currently poring over cereal boxes. Hermione just poured _from_ them; she was pretty sure that that was what they were _for_.

As Draco worked on his thesis about nutrition facts and ingredients (and, she suspected, the puzzles on the back of the boxes), Hermione meandered over to the great refrigerators assigned the task of guarding the sacred milk. Was it Ron who had called it 'cow juice'?

By which she obviously meant, "Was it that fellow from the distant past, with whom I am no longer remotely connected except in a distinctly and determinedly amicable manner?"

Obviously.

Feeling brave, she progressed over to the section with the juices, peering through the glass (or was it plastic?) at their proud titles. _Tropical Orange_. _Cranberry-Apple-Raspberry Delite_. (She thought the hyphens were a bit pretentious, as was the unnecessary alteration to the English language's canon of orthography.) There was an old friend, _Mango-Banana-Papaya Fruit Cocktail_. Then _Apple-Strawberry-Kiwi_. _Country Apple_. _Orange-Tangerine_. _Sudden Death_.

Hermione blinked, started to take a step away, realized that she refused to be scared of _juice_, and leaned in to look again.

_Peach and Pear_? How had she managed to misread _that_?

More importantly, who in their right mind would drink _Peach and Pear_?

The faint squeal of protesting shopping cart wheels heralded Draco's approach. He looked over her shoulder. "_Est-ce qu'il y a quelque chose avec_…" He paused. "What's the French word for 'papaya'?"

"'Papaya'?" Hermione hazarded.

"Probably," Draco mused. "_Je voudrais quelque chose un peu dangereux_. _J'aime vivre comme un héros d'un film d'action_."

Hermione promptly put the translation skills of the brightest young witch of the age to use. "Somehow," she said, "I doubt that action heroes get a rush from drinking weird juices."

"_Mais bien sûr, ma jolie_," Draco remarked calmly, retrieving a carton of _Orange-Strawberry-Banana_ and considering it. "_Je leurs parle fréquemment; ils m'ont dit que oui_."

Seeing as how he put his latest acquisition in the cart, Hermione figured she was doomed anyway.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Reading the newspaper—or _attempting_ to read the newspaper—was entirely impossible when Draco was making dinner.

"_Well, this is it, now; everybody get down; this is all I can take; this is how a heart breaks_…"

Leaning precariously over the back of the couch to look into the kitchen confirmed that he was dancing again, blithely and utterly contentedly, jimmying the hand holding the frying pan and sending innocent pancakes back and forth a few times before flipping them expertly—

Wait a second.

No, wait a whole _minute_. Was he making _pancakes_ for _dinner_?

Actually, once the shock wore off a little, that sounded really good.

"_You take a hit, now; you feel it break down; make you stay wide awake; this is how a heart breaks_..."

Her curiosity staging a coup and getting the better of her, Hermione stood and went to go supervise.

Over the sizzle of the batter in the frying pan, Draco was playing an actual CD, rather than the usual a cappella improvisation. The previous track faded out just as Hermione stepped in. Draco put the pan down, turned up the music, and commenced dancing—suggestively at the least—in a vague circle around Hermione.

"_Now it seems to me that you know just what to say; but words are only words—can you give me something else? Can you swear to me that you'll always be this way? Show me how you feel; more than ever, baby_…"

There was a bit of shameless shimmying, and then he wrapped one arm around her waist, set the other hand between her shoulder blades, and dipped her low.

"_I don't wanna' be lonely no more; I don't wanna' have to pay for this; I don't want to know the lover at my door is just another heartache on my list; I don't wanna' be angry no more; you know I could never stand for this; so when you tell me that you love me, know for sure—I don't wanna' be lonely anymore_…"

He twirled her twice, then snatched up the frying pan before its contents burned, still swaying.

"Draco," she said.

She was about to say a lot of other things when he dumped the frying pan out onto a plate and thrust it at her. "_Voilà, ma cherie_," he interrupted. "_Elles sont parfaites, n'est-ce pas_?"

Risking burnt fingertips, Hermione bit into one. They were fluffy, soft, and sweet—not unlike Draco himself—with a hint of vanilla. "_Oui_," she managed. "_Elles sont très bonnes_."

Draco beamed. "We'll make a French fry out of you yet," he told her delightedly.

"Comforting," Hermione replied dryly. She took another bite of pancake.

They were _très bonnes_.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

At nine the next morning, Hermione pressed the button to page Draco.

"Get my coffee, Coffee Boy," she ordered.

"I shall," he pledged, "as soon as I'm finished cowering in terror at the prospect of your wrath."

As irretrievably facetious as they often were, Hermione never failed to glory quietly in his responses. They proved that he was _there_.

Moments later, there was a knock on her office door. "Come in," she permitted from where she was bent over a memo from the Minister (which was appropriately headed _From the Smoke-Wreathed Desk of Pericles Tyrus_, a triumph in personalized stationery).

Jonas waltzed in, grinning that broad trademark grin of his. "Good _morning_," he bid her. "Might I pluck a minute or two from your busy schedule for us to run and get coffee?"

Hermione smiled apologetically. "I'm afraid Draco's already bringing me some."

Jonas's face fell, but only momentarily. Then he was as bright as his tie again.

"Maybe we could go for muffins?" he said.

She raised an eyebrow, smiling. "Do you need anything other than breakfast, Jonas?"

He flashed the grin again, this time consciously cheesy. "_Maybe_." When she laughed a little, he sobered slightly. "I'm afraid it's the sort of report that'll go down better when preceded by a donut," he explained.

Well, if _that _didn't sap the humor out of the situation, Hermione didn't know what could.

Feeling a frown line cut its way into the skin between her eyebrows, Hermione picked up a pen to give her fingers something to do. "What exactly does this report say?" she inquired.

Jonas looked, rather conspicuously, at the clock. "There… Just that there seems to be an extraordinary rise in crimes against wizards, which means more of them using magic in sight of Muggles, which means more and more memory alterations. It's getting expensive and, worse, very frightening."

The frown line was gouging at her skull now. "What kinds of crimes against wizards?"

Jonas tugged on his tie, which was electric blue with red stripes. Hermione was beginning to see Draco's points about color-blindness and the potential to spread it to others. "Yesterday we tracked down a pink-haired witch who'd used a brutal jinx when she'd been attacked in the street in broad daylight—"

"Pink-haired?" Hermione was about ninety percent sure that her heart had stopped. "You mean Tonks?"

Blinking, Jonas said, "Our Tonks, you mean?" Before Hermione had time to ask him exactly how many Tonkses he knew, he added, "No, no. But we had to do a whole street's worth of memory reconfigurations. On a _Sunday_. And Improper Use—"

"—is notoriously bad about working on weekends; yes," Hermione murmured, tapping her lips with a fingertip. The IU mantra aside, this trend was not a good one. "Go talk to Moody," she suggested, "and see if he has any conspiracy theories for you. And really, just pay attention to the culprits. See if you can find a connection. If we take out the base, the rest falls apart, right?"

"Right," Jonas agreed, nodding resolutely and moving for the exit. In the doorway, he turned, grinning. "Sure I can't get you a donut?"

She smiled. "Yes, Jonas."

Schaeffer offered a salute and then departed.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Hermione had just added her lunch tray to the stack and was about to go over to the prolific frozen yogurt machine to collect Draco when a voice stopped her.

"Found him, did you?"

Her route, as she discovered too late, had brought her right past the table claimed by the Hesperides. The brunette's cherry-red lips were tilted into a magazine-cover smirk; her eyes were dark, and the slender fingers idly suspending a yellow apple were tipped with nails painted a stark blood-red.

Just as Hermione opened her mouth to inform the harpy that it was none of said harpy's business, the harpy in question cut her off.

"In another woman's bed, I presume?" she inquired airily, a sticky hint of malicious amusement glittering in her eyes.

Hermione's brain, capable and capacious as it might have been, shut down without warning. Her hand, disconnected and imbued with a life of its own, picked up one of the dishes sitting placidly before Andray Rachels. The chosen specimen happened to be a small purple dessert plate bedecked with a very generous dollop of chocolate pudding.

She shoved it against the other woman's chest.

There was a squelching noise, and then the entire cafeteria went dead silent for a long, long, long moment.

Long enough for the brunette's eyes to widen; long enough for her red-rimmed mouth to fall open. Long enough for Hermione's subdued brain to rouse itself and promptly skyrocket towards the height of absolute horror.

It was an abrupt ascent, and not a pleasant one.

Then the plate slid off of the Head of the Hesperides's designer blouse and clattered onto the floor.

Hermione's pudding victim screamed.

It was shrill, splitting, and completely intolerable. Clutching at her ears, cringing heavily, Hermione ducked away from the sound.

Which was fortunate, as, at that moment, the assaulted golden-apple-guarder snatched up her blonde cohort's salad and pitched it at the place Hermione's face had been. Leafy greens cascaded through the air like so much autumnal offing from the trees, and the plate nailed an awestruck Auror in the forehead.

Immediately, the woman's coworkers were on their feet, various edibles leaping into their hands. Edibles became projectiles; projectiles found their marks; and howls, shrieks, and the sharp cracking of breaking ceramic plates flooded the room.

Mortified, and also fearing rather a bit for her life, Hermione Granger, twenty-one-year-old witch, Minister of Magical Law Enforcement, the great, the brilliant, the dignified, crawled on her hands and knees under the nearest table and peeked out around a chair.

A flying pastry sent her scrambling back into hiding again.

Falafel took flight, tortillas tore through the air, sandwiches soared, soda splattered, and broccoli blew by. It was chaos in the cafeteria, no doubt about it.

When Hermione turned again, she found that Draco had joined her beneath the table. He was holding, and steadily licking at, a cone of frozen yogurt. Hermione wasn't quite sure how he had managed to crawl while holding it, but she supposed that Draco probably had powers the likes of which she couldn't even begin to comprehend.

"_Aujourd'hui_," he announced, "_c'est le jour le plus amusant que j'ai jamais eu ici_." He grinned. "If you'll pardon my French."


	17. Hell on Toast

_Author's Note: This chapter is composed largely of crappy dialogue, but it is two thousand words of crappy dialogue, so perhaps you can find it in your heart to forgive me._

_And Lordy Lou, everybody takes cool and useful languages… French translations will henceforth be available on my website, linkable from this fic's page. Consider yourself bribed._

* * *

Chapter Seventeen

Hell on Toast

Draco Malfoy had something of an affinity for chaos. There was just something beautiful about it, in an Am-I-Going-to-Die sort of way. And this—with the flying utensils and the spraying drinks and the bespattered faces and clothing of the gustatory gladiators—was the _ballet_ of pandemonium.

Sometimes, Draco really loved his life.

Of course, when Pericles Tyrus chose that moment to step into the cafeteria and howl, "_Who the HELL is responsible for this_?", some of the love faded a little, making room for other emotions.

Like terror.

Then—to greater terror still, and perhaps to greater terror than there had ever been—Hermione crawled out from under the table, stood up, straightened her skirt a little, and put a trembling, tentative hand into the air.

"It's my fault, sir," she managed.

Draco stared. So _that_ was what Gryffindor Brand Bravery really meant. Draco, had it been him, would have pointed at Jonas Schaeffer and run.

Maybe that was what came of being a coward _and_ a villain.

"Might I speak to you in my office, Miss Granger?" Tyrus inquired. As Hermione, head held high, horror in her eyes, walked tremblingly to his side, the Minister's gaze roved over the other, much-stained occupants of the room.

"Put those highly advanced skills of yours to work cleaning this up," he bid them, his eyes icy, every inflection of his voice underpinned by a tone colder still. "It would be criminal to foist it off on the janitorial staff." Like a roiling thundercloud, Tyrus swept away, Hermione scurrying after.

Draco blinked. Then he took to his feet and surveyed the food-strewn wreckage of the cafeteria.

"Hell on toast," he said, awed and impressed.

Well, better than jam. Or jelly. Or whatever.

The girls Hermione hated spent a long time pointing wands at their clothing and whining obstreperously about the state of things, but everyone else, apparently shamed into submission, largely buckled down and got the job done. Draco even contributed personally, after he'd finished his frozen yogurt—just to foster the unexpectedly widespread feeling of goodwill and camaraderie. It was all very unusual, verging on unsettling.

What was even more surprising was that, when Draco returned to his beloved desk, the sweat of righteous toil cooling on his exquisitely-shaped brow, Hermione was already back.

He peeked into her office and looked at her. "Done already?" he asked uncertainly. A mortifiterroriblizing notion struck him. "He didn't _fire_ you, did he? You're not packing up your stuff to leave forever, _are_ you?" Frantically he looked at her desk, searching for cardboard boxes and that wide clear tape, but he didn't see any.

Hermione smiled a little, dispelling coalescing images of new bosses—of bespectacled executives in suits with creases sharp enough to cut your hand off; of balding, middle-aged men who lined up fountain pens and smoked cigars; of exacting, thin-lipped women who would whip him if he put a single dead-sexy toe out of line.

"Mostly," Hermione said, "he just laughed. And then told me that, regrettably, he was obligated to warn me that I oughtn't do that again, or he might have to write me up for gross misconduct."

There was a considerable pause as Draco contemplated the nuances of the situation, and then he remembered a crucial detail.

"He's a Slytherin, isn't he?"

"Well," Hermione replied, "he _was_, anyway."

"'Is,'" Draco insisted. "A Slytherin is forever. Like diamonds, if you ask… Zales, I think."

There was something fragile in Hermione's next smile. Draco Malfoy, who was not nearly as stupid as most people assumed or even as he pretended to be, was pretty sure he knew what had fallen onto one side of the golden balance behind Hermione's eyes.

"De Beers," she corrected. "Though 'Every kiss begins with Kay.'"

Draco tossed himself down in the chair opposite hers. "I find that slightly difficult to believe," he remarked.

"It's a dubious claim, at best," Hermione confirmed.

Draco considered. "I'm fairly sure," he decided, "that chocolate has begun far more intense make-out sessions than have diamonds from Kay Jewelers. In light of which—" He leapt to his feet. "—I am going to go get some."

"I think you need some help," Hermione informed him. "A twelve-step program or a support group or something."

"I'll have you know," Draco retorted, "that I can quit any time I want."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The vending machine, beauteous, bounteous, blessed thing that it was, yielded up a glorious prize, and Draco, cackling quietly to himself, brought it back to his desktop lair. He had only just begun freeing his darling from its foil and paper prison, however, when someone came up to his desk.

It was Ilsa—Ilsa watching him with wide, pleading turquoise eyes, wringing her hands as if there was no tomorrow, so desperately that you couldn't help but wonder if there might not be one after all.

She'd been crying, and mascara had run in ashen lines down her flushed cheeks, but, somehow, she still looked amazing.

Draco wondered if _that_ was what fashion consultants did—looked like movie stars utterly regardless of the circumstances. This, as Draco knew, was not an easy thing to do. On a few occasions, he had tried, and the efforts had gone down like a series of failing planes, complete with people screaming and a plethora of healthy orange flames.

Maybe that was why Draco was destined to be a secretary and not a fashion consultant.

Using his best secretarial skills, he pushed the button on the phone, with all the grace and finesse of… himself.

"Hermione?" he prompted.

"Yes?"

"You should come out here."

Hermione obliged, stopped short, stared at Ilsa, and then suddenly flew into motion again, throwing her arms around the other woman and commencing much soft cooing and stroking of hair.

Draco, damn his selfishness to a thousand fiery Hells, was a teensy bit jealous. Just a teensy bit, but it was nonetheless unconscionable. And being a teensy bit damned was really not much better than going all the way, all things considered.

"What _happened_?" Hermione asked.

New tears drew gray streaks down Ilsa's flawless skin. She cried like a sad scene in a movie—silently, subtly, and glamorously. "A man in the street pushed me down," she whispered. "He took my purse."

Hermione hugged her tightly. "Poor thing," she murmured, stroking at hair and dabbing at tears even more intently now. "I'll help you cancel your credit cards—I can call the bank now, if you like."

"That's not the _real_ problem," Ilsa responded, swiping at the smudges on her cheeks.

"What is, then?" Hermione pressed gently. "I'll do anything I can…"

"He's got my purse," Ilsa said. "So he's also got my wand."

Silence slammed into Draco's face. It hurt. He blinked.

"Hell on _toast_," he noted for the second time in two hours.

"With a side order of brimstone," Ilsa agreed weakly.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"We'll explain the circumstances," Hermione promised. "It wasn't your fault."

"He'll still be mad." Ilsa was occupying the chair by Hermione's desk now, gradually eviscerating the box of paper tissues sitting in her lap. "He always told me not to put it in my purse, but—well, really, where _else_ am I supposed to keep it?"

Girl had a point. There were no pockets that Draco could detect on her sleek silhouette.

"Maybe you should get a fanny pack," Draco suggested.

Both Hermione and Ilsa stared at him as if an alien had just burst out of his stomach.

"What?" he asked. "They're kind of cool."

"And kind of _hideous_," Hermoine replied blankly. "And kind of a bigger fashion faux pas than stripes on polka dots with legwarmers and combat boots."

"_Must_ you concern yourself only with the superficial?" Draco countered. "Doesn't practicality and functional packing power carry any weight—no pun intended?" As Hermione cringed at said pun, he scoffed. "I bet I could use a fanny pack to _accentuate_ my dashing good looks."

"You're on," Hermoine challenged.

Ilsa giggled a little. Draco was pretty sure he would be willing to wear any sort of abomination necessary to smooth out the tension. He didn't much care for tension. There had been enough of it in his youth to make it quite distasteful to him now.

Of course, like a Boomerang of Doom, it came right back again as soon as Hermione dialed the phone.

"Yup?" came the Weasel's bemused voice from the speaker.

"Hi, Ron; it's Hermione."

"What's up?"

"We…" Hermione chewed her lip. "…have a bit of a problem."

"Have you?"

Draco wondered if the fool was capable of making a _statement_, just for a little variety. He was leaning towards _No, that would require him to have a developed brain, with all neurons firing_.

Hermione took a breath and then blurted out the truth of the matter. "Ilsa-got-mugged-and-lost-her-wand."

There was a pause.

"Is she okay?" Weasel-Man asked, almost tentatively.

There was another pause.

"What?" the Great Weasel prompted.

Pauses apparently came in threes, like Golden Kids and good things and Christian deity sorts of figures.

Oh, and good pizza, because two slices was never _quite_ enough.

"Just…" Hermione managed. "Aren't you worried about money? And… the wand? And… everything?"

Draco imagined Ron shrugging nonchalantly. "Those can be replaced. She can't."

There was another pause yet. So they were like what, quadruplets? _Really_ good pizza?

"All right," Hermione declared. "Excellent. Talk to you later, then."

Ilsa sighed happily.

There was _another_ pause, and Draco decided he wasn't even going to _try_ fives.

"Am I on speakerphone?" Ron inquired.

"Of course not," Hermione answered.

"Wh—"

Hermione hung up. Impressively, she only looked a little bit smug.

Six? That was right out.

"When did Ron become sane?" Hermione inquired, possibly still reveling in her speakerphone victory.

"I was going to ask the same question," Draco noted, "except that instead of 'become,' it was 'stop being,' and instead of 'sane,' it was 'such an asshole.'"

"He's always been sane," Ilsa informed them cheerfully, "and he's never been an asshole."

Draco was pretty sure he could collect incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, but he was too lazy. Besides, it was nice that Ilsa suffered from such a romantic delusion about her husband. That was easily the best kind of delusion.

Easily peasily.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Once Ilsa had departed, fortified with about half of Draco's supply of vending machine chocolate, Hermione scrubbed her face with her hands.

"I'd better call the Muggle police," she sighed. "They ought to know about all of this."

"'Lost,'" Draco projected—cynically, it had to be admitted, "'a pointy stick. If found, please throw green dust in fireplace and insert head into flames.'"

"They could be useful in preventing incidents in the first place," Hermione persisted wearily. "Keep everyone out of my office, will you?"

"Dissenters will be shot," he announced, "and survivors will be shot again."

It was a mere ten minutes later, to Draco's devilish delight, that Jonas Schaeffer arrived, looking primed for dissension.

And like a nice target.

_Not today, Tie Demon,_ Draco thought, grimly and with a touch of vindictive glee.

"Hermione in?" Jonas asked cheerfully.

"She's swamped," Draco reported, which prompted a disturbing and kind of morbidly fascinating mental image of Hermione floundering in quicksand. Her clothes were starting to adhere closely to her, betraying every curve and contour, and Draco, armed with a tremendous branch (which was not even remotely symbolic, of course) and a steady place to stand, was about to snatch her right from the brink of disaster, and then she'd press her wet, slightly sticky body to his and snog him senseless—

"This is pretty important," Jonas informed him.

_Your mother is pretty important,_ Draco thought. He managed to bite it back. "As is what she's doing," he replied equably.

"Well," Jonas rejoined, "what's that?"

"Compensating for the fact that _you_ can't do your job," Draco heard himself snap, too late to take back the words.

Jonas gave it a good moment—long enough for Draco to become rapidly more reddish and bite the inside of his cheek with no little force.

"Perhaps I'll come back when you're prepared to be civil," Jonas decided quietly, his eyes inscrutable.

_That's what she said,_ Draco thought, but it was a poor defense, and he knew it.

Damn Jonas Schaeffer, damn his mother, and damn his ties.

If there was one thing Draco Malfoy hated more than an ugly tie, it was looking like an idiot in front of a man wearing one.

That and bad punctuation. He _loathed_ bad punctuation.

And, right now… himself.


	18. Colors

_Author's Note: This is not the climax. This would be a sucky climax. Thank Eltea for the hopefully-not-sucky one to come—not me, har dee har har._

_And sorry it's all… awful… and stuff. On the upside, it's extremely long._

* * *

Chapter Eighteen

Colors

"…_She's a lot like you_," Draco was singing softly as he poured his orange juice, "_the dangerous type_…"

'Dangerous' was not a word with which Hermione generally would have associated herself, but she kind of liked the idea. Maybe she ought to do something drastic to merit the adjective—something involving stilettos and fishnets and black lace.

On second thought, that particular strategy probably wouldn't accomplish much other than scarring them both for life.

Sometimes that was inevitable, but, when possible, Hermione liked to preserve the general mental, emotional, and psychological well-being of herself and those she cared about. Things just tended to work out better that way.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Caffeine Slave," Hermione prompted into the speaker.

"Mistress?" Draco replied.

"You need to get me a couple things, or I'll whip you."

"Sounds kinky!" he decided cheerfully.

"Not in a kinky way," she corrected. "In a you bleeding and hurting and generally not being happy kind of way."

"Damn," he remarked. "I guess my supremely excellent memory will have to preserve me from bleeding, hurting, and other tortures. Do continue."

"I was thinking a scone—or maybe a donut—or maybe a muffin—and I think in my coffee I want milk and cream and sugar and some of that drizzly chocolate syrup—"

Draco made an anguished noise. "Let me get a piece of paper. A piece of paper that's a _foot long_."

Hermione sighed. "Never mind; I'll go get it myself."

Draco gasped. "But surely you're far too _important_ to be expected to acquire your own food! And it's such a strenuous trek to the break room…!"

"Har," Hermione said. She released the button, exited her office, hyperbolically turned up her nose at Draco, and sauntered off towards the break room in question.

A minute-long strenuous trek later, Hermione found her far-too-important self besting the threshold and drifting towards the tantalizing—if empty, greasy, and potentially fatal—calories of the baked goods spread on the countertop like a gift from heaven.

How could you refuse a gift from heaven?

Aside from, you know, just not taking any. Which was roughly equivalent to humanly impossible.

When foreign footsteps moved into the room, she looked up to learn that they belonged to Jonas Schaeffer, who had, as usual, waltzed in as if he owned the place, its occupants, and everything that pertained to both it and them.

"Good morning," he bid her cheerily. "I hope I find you well?"

"Well enough," she replied, suddenly kind of ashamed to be caught in the proximity of the dastardly donuts and the evil éclairs and the truly criminal croissants—gluttonous by association, you might say. "And yourself?"

"Good, good," he reported blithely, toying absently with his lemon-yellow tie, which was bedecked with a pattern of little teal stars. "Have you got anything special planned for this lovely Tuesday?"

"Draco and I were thinking of heading to the park," she informed him.

"Oh?" Jonas lounged against the cheap plastic table, beaming as usual. "Which one?"

Hermione grinned, slightly bashfully. "Whichever's closest to the apartment?" she guessed.

Jonas flashed another winning smile. "Sounds like a pretty solid plan," he decided.

There were a few possible explanations for this statement. The first was that Jonas was too naïve to understand just how weak, halfhearted, and haphazard a 'plan' it was. The second was that he was simply making conversation. The third was that he was a compulsive liar, and the fourth was that he was high.

The world might never know.

Well, giving him the benefit of the doubt, if you took "a solid plan" to indicate "slightly better than no plan at all," Jonas was right on the money.

Hell, maybe he was being sarcastic. It was in vogue these days—on posters and runways and magazine covers everywhere, no less. Taking Paris, Tokyo, New York, and Milan by storm.

Hermione kind of wondered if there was some sort of hoity-toity English term for what she'd just done. She was betting on _yes_.

"It's something to do," she told Jonas, bolstering the bland answer with a shrug and a smile. "Unwind a little."

The word put her in mind of thousands of tiny spools unraveling, dashing myriad threads on the floor like so much multicolored spaghetti.

She then proceeded to wonder if it was possible to spike toast. That seemed to be the only way to explain this phenomenon—this convergence of a craving for unhealthy foods and a tendency for literal mental images.

"That's viable," Jonas agreed, still displaying his luminous grin. "Maybe we should all go for drinks some night, to unwind a little more. I want to introd—"

The table shifted, and Jonas Schaeffer, blinking, rediscovered himself sitting on the floor.

Hermione almost incurred a hernia trying not to laugh.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The grass was Floo Powder-green, a brisk wind rippling like an affectionate hand over the low hills coated in it, and the malicious chill in the air hadn't quite managed to empty the park. A boy in his very early teens and his younger brother were, in the manner of boys, ignoring the posturing of the weather, the better to tear around wildly with their sleek golden retriever. The boys themselves each sported a head of unruly gilded curls and a pair of bright brown eyes like fireplace grates lit from within.

In about three seconds, Draco had squeezed Hermione's hand, released it, and gone racing off to join them. Sighing fondly, Hermione looked for an empty bench upon the welcoming slats of which she might watch a twenty-year-old man become five again.

Then she saw, on the nearest bench, a horror beyond imagination—a terror the likes of which the very world swelled to encompass.

With a cheery wave, Lychorida Bolton chirped, "Hello, dear!"

It was too late to run.

Weighted by a feeling of impending doom, Hermione threw on a big smile and joined her neighbor.

Shockingly, nothing weird or humiliating came out of Lychorida Bolton's mouth. She merely returned the smile placidly, her knitting fingers moving with the faultless efficiency of complex clockwork, nodded to Draco, and remarked, "He'll be good with children."

"I think you're right," Hermione responded softly, even as Draco dropped down on his hands and knees, presumably grinding grass stains of epic proportions into the fabric of his slacks, and capered right along with the dog.

It would have ruined the moment to add, "Largely because he is one."

Lychorida patted Hermione's knee, and the familiar awkwardness of conversing with the marvelously mad old lady returned in force.

"He probably has incredible energy and enthusiasm for _everything_, doesn't he?"

_Bow chicka bow wow,_ Hermione thought, largely in spite of herself.

"Ah," she managed, "yes. Yes, he does." _I'm talking about washing dishes and making pancakes,_ she reminded herself firmly. _Her mind may be embedded in the gutter, but mine's safely on the sidewalk. It's wearing stilts on the sidewalk, just for a bit of extra height. And jumping!_

She stopped before she had to slap herself. It was a close thing.

Lychorida smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling, the crinkles crinkling, lines on lines like a river delta, intricate and intriguing. "I'm happy for you, dear," she reported. "I do believe he's everything you've ever needed."

The object of the pronoun was flinging a Frisbee with all of his might and laughing uproariously as the dog went streaking after it.

The scary thing was that Lychorida was right. Scarier still was the fact that this trend wasn't all that unusual.

A half-senile, bespectacled prophetess gathered her knitting (which, judging by the colors involved, might have been the source of Jonas Schaeffer's ties), smiled, and tottered off.

Life was a crazy, surreal, play-by-ear kind of thing at the best of times. That much Hermione knew for sure.

The older boy threw the Frisbee expertly, and the dog surged into motion.

Then the white plastic disk exploded in midair, and fragments rained down like fallen stars.

There was a man walking towards Draco and the kids and their dog, a man in a black, hooded cloak, with a dark wand in one pale hand. He lifted it and angled it almost idly.

Hermione couldn't hear the words, but she saw the man's mouth move. She saw the bolt of green light that delved through shining golden fur. And she saw the dog crumple to the grass, limp and lifeless.

She did hear Draco's voice as he brandished his wand like a sword and shouted the Killing Curse as loudly as his lungs would permit.

Spells flew, fast and frenetic, until the hooded man lost patience and Apparated to the patch of grass just behind Draco.

Who turned around and punched him in the face.

The man stumbled, but then, before Draco could raise his wand again, Dispparated, out of the vicinity this time.

Hermione looked down and saw that her feet had carried her halfway to the fight without her even noticing she'd moved. She looked at the empty, empty expressions on the boys' white faces, and then she knelt, closed her eyes, remembered every inflection of Draco's laugh, and then whispered, "_Expecto patronum_."

A silver river otter squirmed obediently from the tip of her wand, tilting its head to peer at her with intelligent eyes. She tried to touch its ear, and her finger slipped through.

"To Pericles Tyrus," she said. "We need a small crew out here with some memory wipe specialists, and fast."

The otter nodded, rolled playfully once in the air, caught sight of the look on her face, and darted off, urgently now.

Something aching deep within, Hermione got to her feet. She had barely had time to reach the boys and draw them, their wide eyes only now beginning to brim, into her arms before a group of Ministry workers Apparated with a series of sharp _crack_s. In moments, she and Draco were entirely alone.

And either one Draco Malfoy, dignified heir, had some dandelion fuzz in his eye, or he felt much the same way she did.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

When they'd returned to Number 78, neither of them having uttered a word, Draco sat down on the coffee table and didn't move. Hermione collapsed on the couch and succumbed to the tidal wave of Etch A Sketch despair coalescing in the center of her chest—jagged and indistinct, poorly outlined in the feebly-throbbing, monochrome misery of black on gray. Waiting to be shaken away into the quicksand oblivion of peerless depression.

Without warning, Draco leapt up and began pacing furiously and gesticulating wildly. "The bomb at the manor," he said, ticking the list off on his fingers, "the fire at the Ministry; the people who attacked you; whoever told Leonine where I was; the guy the other night—what if it's all _connected_? What if there's something tying it all together?" He stopped. Then, frozen still, he spoke again in a low voice. "The people who went after you," he prompted. "Do you remember anything strange about them? Were they acting sort of… disconnected?"

Helplessly Hermione shrugged, and then she realized that he was still staring at the carpet and supplied, "Not that I remember, no."

He looked up at her, and something odd and brilliant was alight in his eyes. "I think," he said, "that Leonine was Imperiused. Maybe yours were, too. Maybe…" He was back to pacing, the same four strides towards the table and back again. "Maybe there's someone who _started_ the fire, and who _knew_ where we were…" Once more he halted in mid-step, and this time he spun, literally ran over to her, and stood trapping her eyes with his. "Did you tell anyone," he asked slowly, "that we were going to the manor?"

"Well…" Hermione shifted uncomfortably, ducking his searching gaze, and sifted through her memory. "…I might've told Ginny…"

"Did you mention it to anyone at work?" Draco pressed. "Anyone like _Jonas Schaeffer_?"

Hermione's eyes widened, and she stared at him. "I don't… remember… telling him," she whispered, "but I… might have…"

"Schaeffer," Draco said, crisply, distinctly, and with absolute loathing. "It's Schaeffer. It has to be. He _knew_ where we were going to be; he was _at_ the Ministry; he can obviously whip off a good spell—"

"But _why_?" Hermione demanded. "Why would Jonas Schaeffer, who wears ugly ties and loves his work, try to _kill_ us?"

Draco looked at her. "Not us," he corrected. "Me."

"_What_? That's ridic—"

"It _isn't_ ridiculous," he interjected, taking up the pacing one more time. "He wanted either to knock me right off or, when that wasn't possible, make it look like having me was too dangerous and too much work. Like it wasn't safe. And if he actually did kill me in the bargain, all the better. He could see to it that the report got buried in the files somewhere. And that left an open route directly to _you_."

Hermione was floundering, and she feared that the sinking and drowning part was imminent. "But," she managed, "what kind of idiot would do something like _that_ for _me_?"

One more time, Draco stopped, and one more time, he looked at her.

"I would," he said.

Hermione stared at him. "You wouldn't," she told him, almost blankly. "You're far too rational."

He turned his back, his hands folded behind him, and lowered his gaze to the carpet. "Love isn't rational, dear heart."

The word almost stopped her own circulatory system in its tracks, but then it was galloping off again as a momentary memory choked her, digging its fingers into the walls of her throat.

"Oh, God," she gasped.

Draco looked at her. "What?"

"I told him."

"'Him'? I need some proper nouns here, love."

The tears found her at last and pried the door off of her bomb shelter. She didn't have the strength to fight them. They just kept coming.

"Jonas," she said. "I told him we were going to the park."


	19. Cats and Mice

_Author's Note: I hope this one isn't as anticlimactic a climax as was last time's._

_This chapter was written between eleven PM and three AM on a Friday night, when I'd been up until two on Thursday, because I was determined to get the damn thing done, so bear with me._

_Hahahaa, 'cause the reason I was up that Thursday was 'cause I was reading 'The Bear' by Faulkner… Yeah, you don't give a crap. Moving on!_

_This chapter also calls for a quote from Trinity: "And since I am the ranking officer on this ship, if you don't like it, I believe you can go to Hell."_

_That's my policy; take it or leave it._

* * *

Chapter Nineteen

Cats and Mice

The first thing Draco saw when he approached his desk Wednesday morning was the blinking light on the answering machine.

_Oh, no, you didn't,_ he thought.

_Oh, yes, I did,_ his inner Jonas replied.

Hell in a handbag, shit in a shoebox, and crap in a crate; he had an _inner Jonas_ now?

He supposed, however, that it was not entirely unexpected, given that he had spent many hours of the previous night mulling and musing and trying not to mutter vituperatively, all upon the subject of a certain Tie Demon. The muttering wouldn't have made much of a difference to anyone but Sparky, however, as Hermione hadn't slept any more than he had.

He pressed the button before Hermione could retreat into her office, and Jonas Schaeffer's smarmy voice greeted them with far too much smarminess and cheer and _Jonas_ for any hour of the morning, let alone this one.

"Hi, Hermione; just wanted to give you a heads-up that I'll be out today—got some things at home that need taking care of."

_You ended a sentence with a preposition,_ Draco told him mentally,_ and therein have SEALED YOUR DOOM._

"Hopefully I'll be back tomorrow, and if there's anything terribly urgent, you can give me a call at home, though I can't guarantee I'll be able to get to the phone. Well, that's all. Thanks, and have a good day!"

"_Beep_," concluded the machine.

"_Beep_ you and your _beep_ing _beep_ and everything you _beep_ for," Draco muttered back. He turned to Hermione and raised an eyebrow. "The plot thickens," he remarked.

She frowned.

Draco detected, first as a faint sort of tickling, then as a distinct bubbling, that getting-an-idea feeling. "Ooh," he said. "Ooh, ooh, ooh."

"Are you a monkey?" Hermione inquired.

"I'm getting a _brilliant plan_, woman," he retorted. "Don't distract me…" He covered his eyes with his hands, the better to focus on the magnificence of the intellect unfolding before him.

His _own_ intellect, that was. Couldn't emphasize that enough.

"Got it," he announced, lowering his hands. "Let's do a _stakeout_."

Hermione did not look appropriately impressed. Rather, she looked a bit incredulous. "That's creepy," she told him.

"No," he corrected, "it's brilliant. There's a difference. A substantial difference, in fact."

Hermione massaged her temples with her fingertips. After a moment of wishing that he was one or both of her temples, Draco took it up again.

"All we've got to do," he explained, "is check out his file, find his address, and go skulk around a little under the cover of darkness."

He was about to add that it was foolproof when he remembered what had happened _last_ time he'd made that particular claim.

Getting into the files was easier even than Draco had expected. All it really entailed was going over to one of the file cabinets along the wall of Hermione's office, flipping through the _S_ section, plucking out the desired folder, and (ignoring the snapshot of Jonas with the usual larger-than-most-people's-livers grin) glancing at the first page.

"And now," Draco concluded triumphantly, "we wait."

Hermione was looking at him, her chin resting on her hand, her elbow on her desktop. He wanted to think that it was a sultry, come-on-over-here-you-fantabulousirrific-thing sort of look, but that was a bit of a stretch.

A bit.

"You don't seem to operate very well without sleep," Hermione observed.

"Show me a patient and a scalpel," Draco replied, cracking his knuckles, "and I'll show _you_ how I operate without sleep."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It was the depth of the night.

Okay, it was more like the shallows of the night.

Okay, it was eight-thirty.

Whatever the case, Draco and Hermione were creeping across the highly average lawn of the modest house that occupied the address they'd obtained.

Draco was pretty sure he should have been a professional thief. Or that he'd been a ninja in a past life.

Tripping on a sprinkler head and falling flat on your face was something once-ninja professional thieves did all the time.

Obviously.

"_Ow_," he moaned.

"Can't you keep quiet for two seconds?" Hermione hissed. She looked extraordinarily sexy with her hair tied back and the 'camouflage' they'd improvised with black face paint exaggerating her dark, shining eyes. Maybe she'd trip and fall on top of him, and—

She sighed. "I can't believe I let you come."

He struggled to his feet and went into a Certified Sneaky Crouch again. You seriously couldn't sneak properly unless you were crouching.

Haha, _Sirius_ and _Crouch_. Azkaban buddies.

Erm, once-ninja professional thief. Right.

They crawled into the bushes below the lit front window, said bushes crackling in a most obnoxious manner and imparting to hair, faces, and clothing a vast variety of leaves, as if attempting to bribe the newcomers to stay longer.

Draco was trying to get one of these lonely leaves out of his mouth when Hermione, peeking through the glass, whispered, "I don't like this. I feel like we're stalking him."

"Well," Draco responded, grimacing at the distinctly woody taste that the leaf had left as a parting gift, "he probably stalked you, so consider this payback time."

"Shh!" Hermione whispered furiously, waving a hand at him.

Draco poked his head over the windowsill beside her and peered into the living room. Even as he watched, the silhouette in the doorway to the kitchen solidified into the shape of a… man.

A pale man with red hair, freckles, and glasses, whose right arm was trapped in both a plaster cast and a sling, and who sat down on the couch facing away from them and propped his feet up on the coffee table.

It was then that Jonas Schaeffer danced into the living room, his face aglow, his partner invisible. He grinned the biggest grin yet, which was really saying something.

The redhead, who was thin, almost delicate-looking, but with what seemed to be a frame of steel beneath the surface like insulated wire, got up again.

Then he crossed the room, buried the fingers of his left hand in Jonas Schaeffer's thick hair, and kissed him.

They went at it for a long time, actually.

Draco might have admired their tenacity and creativity both if his jaw hadn't just dropped farther than he'd thought it could go. Some vague, distant part of him hoped it wouldn't get dislocated or something.

It was a little bit odd to Draco Malfoy, as a self-respecting male young adult, that there was something deeply _all right_ about sitting there, with thorns plucking insistently at his clothes, with leaf dust in his mouth, with the cold sending tendril fingers down the back of his neck, and basking in the luminescence of a love brighter even than Jonas Schaeffer's smile.

"I," Draco remarked thoughtfully, "have been the biggest asshole this side of Cromwell."

"Kinda'," Hermione conceded.

Everything was quiet for a moment, a moment in which Draco felt the warm yellow light tingle on his skin, touched the chain he'd worn around his neck for over a week, and wondered when.

Maybe now that he'd grown up and stopped being such a worthless, judgmental, hypocritical _prick_. You know, just for starters.

Then, of course, the quiescence was shattered.

"_Get down_!" Hermione hissed.

Jonas was glancing at the window, and the would-be stalkers ducked frantically, but not quite frantically enough. The murmur of combined voices separated out into two distinct ones, getting clearer still as Jonas approached the window.

"What was that?" the redhead asked, faint worry running like a subterranean stream beneath the words.

Draco, heart going pitter-patter in a rather disconcerting way, peered at Hermione, her face dappled with a pattern of leaves thrown by the yellow light from the house, but her bright, grave eyes were on the windowsill, and he knew she was listening hard and thinking harder.

"Probably a cat or something," Jonas replied, but he didn't sound entirely convinced. "I'll take a look."

All told, there were about fifteen seconds between the moment at which the sound-waves reached their ears and the one at which Jonas put a foot onto the front step, but Hermione, perhaps simply because she was Hermione, clipped him with a neat, if whispered, Conjunctivitis Curse the instant that he did. Then she grabbed Draco's arm and dragged him through the bushes and over the wooden fence partitioning the Schaeffer yard from the neighbors' property.

He later discovered splinters in unpleasant places.

And bitched about it more than it merited, though he preferred to call the pursuit "using his God-given talents."

In the relative safety of the shadow of the fence, Draco and Hermione sat and panted a little. Then, finding sitting and panting slightly boring, Draco commenced gently teasing the leaves out of Hermione's hair, which now merited the "bushy" tagline more than ever.

"I feel like a chimpanzee," she muttered.

"Grooming is a very important social activity for higher primates," Draco told her.

"Including humans?"

"What, you've never had a party with your little friends and played with each other's hair? We call it a sleepover; chimps don't call it anything, because they don't have a verbal language, but the concept is essentially the same."

"You're a well of useless information, aren't you?"

Draco grinned. "Glad to be of service."

A twig snapped not far away—but too far to be a result of their movement.

Silence rolled in like a thick fog.

"Cat?" Draco breathed.

"I… don't… know," Hermione answered.

Draco got the feeling it was a cat. But not the kind they wanted.

He leaned in very close and took Hermione's hand tightly in his.

"_Run_," he whispered.

He pulled her to her feet, and they did just that.

There was a spell—sizzling purple and lightning-fast—and they ducked it.

Then there was a bullet, which, by some small miracle, missed them and instead drew a miniature explosion of rubble from a nearby scenic stone wall.

"JesusChristGodprophetsApollo," Draco heard himself pant.

Hermione fought out her wand and put her Focused Face on, but nothing happened. She wrinkled her nose, jerked them around a corner, slammed them back up against a wall, and focused harder still, but nothing happened now either.

"Anti-Apparition Jinx," she gritted out.

"Hell" was all that Draco had the breath for.

They ran for a long time, taking alleys and backstreets and shortcuts, doubling back, turning ninety-degree corners, elusive like the perfect comeback.

But not elusive enough.

Every time they stopped, over the hammering of their hearts and the raggedness of their mingling breath that misted in the cold, they heard footsteps. If they waited long enough, there were spells to accompany them.

They tried not to wait.

Draco could feel Hermione's pulse beating in every one of her fingers as he paused on a main road that looked dreadfully familiar.

"The Ministry," Hermione managed. "Come on—"

They slipped inside, into the main foyer, its expanses wide and silent, everything settling in shades of blue in the moonlight. The fountain lay still, its surface unruffled like that of a great, unseeing eye. They collapsed on the far side, seeking refuge in the weak cover provided by the pool's low wall. The steps came, slow, steady, and unstoppable, and Draco tried to cower, to cram himself under the lip of the raised rim, tried not to breathe, just for a single crucial moment…

It was about as possible as making Ron shut up during a Quidditch game.

Pity, that.

As the echoing steps came closer, he felt for Hermione's wrist, found it, grasped it tightly, and then, at the last second before discovery came, dragged them both up and off again, firing a Confundus Charm over his shoulder without even looking to see where it landed. There was no scream of frustrated agony, which was a pretty good indication that it hadn't hit its mark.

The door slammed open when he threw his shoulder into it, admitting them onto the stairs; up, his knees begging for mercy, and up further still; down a corridor, along a hallway, always with the ruthless resonations of the footfalls not far behind. Disorientation brought them somehow to Draco's desk, and there he stopped.

"Home turf," he declared, though the word _declared_ implied something of surety and authority, rather than of wretchedness and beaten exhaustion. "Custer's last stand."

"We're way cooler than Custer," Hermione panted, and Draco knew, well enough to make his protesting knees go weaker still, that he would never, _could_ never, love another woman as much as he loved this one. There wasn't anything he wasn't willing to give to and for Hermione Granger, his life included. His life, his pride, his soul, his words, his thoughts, his hopes, his dreams, and his heart. They were hers. Forever.

Arturo Leonine came around the corner with a wand in one hand and a pistol in the other. He smiled.

Draco was waiting.

Accordingly, Arturo Leonine received a hefty fistful of origami cranes right in the face.

As he cursed and swiped at the sticky notes trying to adhere to his hair, Draco shouted, "_Expelliarmus_!"

Quite promptly, there was a gun in his free hand.

He stared at it, then at his wand.

"Piece of _shit_!" he cried, unsure just which he was referring to.

"_Sectumsempra_!" Leonine roared, and Draco dodged in time but dropped the gun, a bit too preoccupied to watch it skitter away across the floor. He whirled and tried for a Full-Body Bind, but Leonine was waiting with a shield and a smirk, a combination he followed up with a vicious curse Draco didn't even _recognize_. Draco countered with _defodio_; Leonine deflected it and bellowed, "_Reducto_!"

Draco, who was blaming all of this on the long run, seeing as how he was _obviously_ blessed with a _sprinter's_ physique instead, didn't even remember what that one did until he'd been slammed into the wall, his head spinning, bruises blooming at the points of impact.

Something told him that bruises were the least of his problems.

That something, which was alternately called 'The deep and terrible darkness in Arturo Leonine's eyes,' came quickly closer, and a thick, immovable arm pressed against his windpipe. His fingers scrabbled against it, his voice a reedy whisper—

"_Please_—"

Leonine, his lip curling, pressed the point of his wand to the hollow under Draco's chin.

"And they lived happily," he sneered, "ever… after. _Avada Kedav_—"

The sound was deafening, like a clap of thunder and the breakage of bone and the snapping of predators' jaws all at once, and it rang in Draco's ears like a memorized prayer, repeated until it made no sense.

For a long moment, he didn't know which of them had been shot, and then Arturo Leonine's eyes, locked onto his, glazed over, and the other man toppled to the floor.

Hermione tossed the gun down and kicked it away, her hands shaking, her eyes averted, her hair having long since escaped its elastic bonds.

Draco went to her. He took her face in both hands, tilted it until she looked at him, and said the words that had ridden in a knot between his shoulder blades for more than a year.

"I love you," he said. "More than I knew I had it in me to love."

She slipped her arms around his neck and pressed herself to him, and he buried his face in her hair and breathed deeply of her.

Against his neck, he heard her murmur something that might have been "Lasagna nude."

But it also sounded rather a bit like "I love you, too."

* * *

_Author's Note: If you feel so inclined, go back and reread every snippet of Jonas's dialogue. He's one of the nicest characters I've ever created, and I love him. Draco has just been a jealous bastard, and hopefully he will be smarter next time. Just because he's cute doesn't mean he's always right. Don't ever let anyone tell you what to think._

…_Except just now, when I told you not to let anyone tell… you… never mind._

_LovingLupin—my jaw dropped at your last chapter's review. You totally WON. Props also to RichelleShalark and Mistyquest for being able to look through the ties to give the wonderful Mr. Schaeffer a bit of much-deserved credit._

_Seriously, guys, is an ugly tie reason enough to suspect someone of plotting, deceit, and attempted murder? …Remind me not to wear ties… ever…_


	20. Epilogue: Carbohydrate Courage

_Author's Note: OH MY GOD IT'S DONE._

_You have no idea how hard this was._

_No, you really have no idea._

_Shut up. And review._

…_Please?_

* * *

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue: Carbohydrate Courage

A long time later, when they had fortified themselves enough to break apart, Hermione watched silently as Draco approached Leonine's body. From the breast pocket of his fallen adversary's coat, Draco withdrew a piece of parchment, folded three times. He glanced at Hermione, stood, and then opened it.

The page was blank.

"How anticlimactic," he muttered.

Then, perfectly on cue, black ink appeared, as if seeping from a wound deep within the paper's core. The message was formatted like an elegant invitation. First came the hostess's title.

_Queen of Shadows._

Then came her address.

_Speculum Veneficia, Scotland._

Then came a date, and a time.

_Today, 9:56 PM._

Hermione glanced at the clock, seeing Draco do the same out of the corner of her eye. The minute hand flicked rightward, moving from fifty-five to fifty-six.

And then came two more words.

_Hello, dears._

Draco stared at the letters. Then he stared at Hermione, who stared right back at him and said slowly, "She wanted us to find this."

Draco's eyebrows rose a little. "No kidding," he agreed.

There was a long pause, stretching for eons, after which they heard the minute hand flick. Staring at the page, they both watched the tiny ink number change from a six to a seven.

"Jesus," Hermione said.

"I think Mr. Christ would be a bit more cordial," Draco decided faintly. He looked at the paper a moment longer, and then he folded it and stowed it in a pocket. The makeshift lines of camouflage had smeared all over his face, and his eyes shone from the midst of the grayish muddle like diamonds in ash. "Shall we go?" he inquired.

Hermione surprised herself, managing a grin. "Yes," she said. "Let's go."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Hermione unfolded the paper at least once a day and peered at it, as if it might yield its innermost secrets under scrutiny, but the stubborn scrap of parchment held firm. The ink was static now, perhaps to mark the occasion, perhaps to drive her mad.

It was doing pretty well at both.

Draco, who had something of a preoccupation of his own with itching his neck, noticed her fixation. So did Sparky, who tried upon multiple occasions to sit on the paper, though she always managed to whip it out of reach in time.

"We'll work on that," Draco promised. "For the moment, the Weasels and the Gardeners have invited us to go out with them on Sunday."

Hermione arched an eyebrow. "Gardeners?"

Draco shrugged. "Potter, Planter, Gardener—it's all the same, isn't it?"

"Not _quite_," Hermione replied.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

As Hermione quickly discovered Sunday morning, Harry, Ron, Ginny, and Ilsa were not accustomed to shopping with Draco. This little detail became most glaringly evident when they let him walk by a candy store.

First of all, had the quartet known anything about traveling with the Talented Mister Malfoy, they would have planned a route that avoided all candy stores by at least a quarter of a mile. Second, if they had found themselves with no choice but to pass by one, they would have taken that opportunity to distract Draco as much as possible by pointing out a vast variety of shiny things on the other side of the street.

_Amateurs, _Hermione thought, scoffing to herself.

Draco came bouncing out of the shop a few minutes later with a lollipop the size of his head and a foot-long chocolate bar.

Ron stared at him. "Is he going to _eat_ all that?" he asked Hermione.

"It'll probably take him about an hour," she replied.

"For which?"

"For both."

It was a conservative estimate.

"Why do you need so _much_?" Ilsa was asking Draco, giggling a little.

"Carbohydrate courage," Draco responded airily, pausing in his emphatic licking of the lollipop.

"What do you need that for?"

"If it works," Draco told her, "you'll find out soon enough."

For one reason or another, before she could either parse it or spin around and demand a translation, the statement reminded Hermione, with a jolt, of something that had happened what felt like a thousand years ago.

"Oh, Harry?" Hermione prompted. When he turned, she went on, "Ginny wishes you wouldn't watch so much American football, or at least that you'd watch it with her. She just feels kind of excluded, and it worries her a little."

Harry blinked. "Sure, of course," he said. He turned to Ginny, looking remorseful and apologetic. "I didn't even realize. I'm sorry."

Ginny had flushed the same approximate color as her hair. "It's fine," she managed.

"American football?" Draco cut in then, before it became the kind of isolated Tender Moment that made everyone else glance around and whistle to themselves. "Potter, _honestly_. It's even _unpatriotic_. The Queen would slap you across the face and then bean you with her handbag for good measure."

Harry shook his head stubbornly. "I saved Wizarding England at seventeen," he contended. "I daresay she'd cut me some slack."

"I _daresay_ she'd beat you with a stick," Draco retorted, but he was grinning behind the cover of his lollipop. "A big stick. With spikes."

"She should use one of those scepter things," Harry noted blithely. "Maybe the one with the orb on it."

Draco eyed him. "Have you been watching the _History Channel_ too?"

Tellingly, Harry blushed.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

When, forty-two minutes later, the last of the chocolate had disappeared down Draco's throat, he deposited the wrapper in a trashcan, wiped his hands on his jeans, and took a deep breath.

"All right," he said. "Moment of truth."

He took off his jacket and handed it to Ginny, who raised an eyebrow. Next he peeled off his T-shirt and tossed it to Ron, who fumbled, trying not to touch it, and threw it at Harry, who passed it on to Ilsa in much the same manner. Then he went down on one knee, grasped the silver chain around his neck, lifted it free, took the ring strung onto it in his right hand, and raised it to Hermione.

"Love," he said, "I will be the first to concede that we are both very young, and that I, in particular, am very stupid, but I know, with more certainty than I have ever known anything, that I want to spend the rest of my ridiculous life with you, whatever that may entail." He smiled at her, slightly weakly. "So I guess the question I'm asking is—Hermione Granger, are you mad enough to marry me?"

Hermione couldn't breathe. She couldn't breathe, couldn't think, and could hardly see, except for the tentative grin and the shining eyes of the man kneeling before her.

"Yes!" she cried. "I mean, no, I'm perfectly sane! I mean—I mean, what kind of psychopath _are_ you; of _course_ I will!"

She was dreaming. It was the only possible explanation.

His face like a small sun, Draco tugged the ring free of the chain and slipped it onto her finger—not an easy task, given how much her hands were shaking.

She stared down at the glinting diamond. Suddenly, her very average left hand looked like a work of art. Disbelieving tears of impossible joy sprung to her eyes, and the picture blurred.

It was at that moment that Draco slipped his arms around her and kissed her. He tasted overwhelmingly of chocolate, and the passerby who had stopped to watch burst into hearty applause.

Just as they'd broken apart, flushing (and, in Draco's case, shivering a little), both grinning fit to crack their faces in half, Ginny darted in to kiss Draco on the cheek. He blushed a bit pinker still, and a bit pinker than that when Ilsa followed suit.

When Harry moved forward, however, Draco drew the line. He also raised his fingers to make a warding cross.

"I can and will hurt you, Potter. And the Queen's not here to protect you this time."

Hermione had, after this interval, mostly recovered her voice.

"Where did you get this?" she managed to ask, and no one had to ask what the hanging _this_ referred to.

"It was my mother's," Draco reported.

"When did you see your mother?" She tried to frown a little, the better to look pensive, but her face wouldn't comply.

Draco waved a careless hand, almost knocked some innocent shopper's hat off, and then relegated his hand-waving to a slightly smaller radius. "One of the days you had lunch with Ginny," he divulged. "I Apparated over, we talked a little, I pried it off of her cold, dead fing—convinced her to give it to me, and Apparated back to find that my lunch hour had snuck away, never to return."

A puzzle piece fell into place in Hermione's mind. "Was that the night you ate five tacos at dinner?" she inquired.

Draco scoffed. "Four and three-quarters at the absolute _most_," he said.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

As they lay in bed, Hermione held her arm in the air, smiling, tilting her hand back and forth and watching the pale light from the window playing on the diamond's surfaces.

Draco flopped down next to her and twirled his fingers in her hair a little. "You're going to sleep with that thing on?" he asked.

"Why not?" Hermione replied.

"Because," Draco explained, "if you roll over right, you'll either blind me or cut me into little, bite-sized pieces, at which point Sparky may eat what's left."

"I think you'd give him indigestion," Hermione noted.

"I'm serious," Draco insisted, but his grin belied him. "Put that thing away before someone loses an eye."

"And what if I say 'no'?" she countered, grinning back.

"Then I'll be sad," he told her. "Think of poor Sparky over there—the only thing he's got the _right_ number of is eyes."

Hermione smiled and looked at the ring a little more.

"It's beautiful," she noted softly.

"So are you," Draco said, tugging on a particularly tight curl and smiling as it sprung back.

Hermione considered. "I don't think I _ever_ want to take it off," she decided.

Draco laid his head on the pillow and sighed. "I," he declared, "should have bought you a diamond-encrusted motorcycle instead. At least you wouldn't be able to get it into the bed."

"I could try," she replied.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

When the alarm sang the next morning, Hermione scrabbled for it and then slammed a fist on the appropriate button. She extricated herself from the mess of limbs and sheets, sat up, and slipped off of the bed.

She had taken two steps towards the bathroom when she paused, looked at the ring, looked at Draco, smiled a little to herself, and crawled back into bed.

The Ministry could wait ten minutes.

Or twenty minutes.

Or half an hour.

Or a year.

Draco rolled partway over, murmured "_La papaye est bonne_," and wrapped his arms around her.

And everything was good.

The papaya included.

* * *

_Author's Note: First of all, I would like to say two words: Thank you._

_Next update's the appendix/bibliography; ignore if it you like, don't if you enjoy that kind of crap. Your choice!_

_Count on (read: hope for) the final installment this summer, when I no longer have to grapple with that, what's-it-called, school thing. In the meantime, I'll probably play with smaller stuff, if I play around in the Potterverse much at all, because long storylines are unbelievably exhausting._

_I salute you all for putting up with me for forty thousand words. To commemorate this occasion, there are a couple more icons up on my site, should you feel inclined to view them and/or use them for things._

_Also, fittingly, today, at least at press (April 14, 2008, that is), is the first year anniversary of the posting of my very first Harry Potter fanfiction on this site. As you can see, I really ought to transfer my addictive behavior to something more constructive, like cheap cocaine. In the meantime, we'll have to see what the next year brings._

_Which may just be cheap cocaine._

_Don't bet the farm._

_Adoringly and grammatically, as always,_

_Tierfal_


	21. Appendix, Bibliography, Rambling

Appendix/Bibliography/Needless Rambling  
_In an All-New, Never-Before-Seen, Highly-Hyphenated Format!_

**Chapter One:**

Cleon's Pizza – Cleon is the king of the starving realm of Tarsus in _Pericles_, remember? Gawd, do your homework. No, really. What the hell are you doing reading fanfiction? On that note… what the hell am I doing writing it…?

**Chapter Two:**

"_Ma grandmère est flambée_" – Eddie Izzard could kick your ass any day of the week. And his name is not Tracy.

_Doctor Who_ – Such a fun show. And it's British. The best was the episode when the Doctor and Martha ended up in Depression-era New York, because it was a bunch of Brits doing rather poor American accents, whereas it's usually me wandering around doing a poor British accent. Glorious. No, actually, the best was the Shakespeare one. No room for argument. I geeked out like you wouldn't believe.

**Chapter Three:**

Chicken Pox – For all you young'uns out there, once upon a time, we had no chicken pox vaccine. And I got 'em when I was two or so, because my brother brought them back from preschool. I don't remember details, but I seem to recall that it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I wouldn't recommend it.

Cars Bars – All credit goes to the aforementioned brother for suggesting I manufacture such a thing with Photoshop, though I did inspire him by listening to the Cars almost nonstop over the summer. I believe I actually did the Cars Bar project during _Her and Me_, come to think of it. Small world. Or small life.

Perry Simons – I had paused in the sentence searching for a name, and then I had to leave my computer to dart into the shower before my brother stole it. (The shower, not the computer. He has his own. Which doesn't suck as much as mine, possibly because he didn't purchase his on eBay.) While showering, I remembered Simonides from _Pericles_, and then decided to shorten it to Simons, and then Perry just sounded right. LOOK, DO NOT CHALLENGE MY DURING-SHOWER THOUGHTS, OKAY?!

1812 Overture – Tchaikovsky. Sheesh. Didn't you read _Devil's Advocate_? …No? No one did? Because it was boring as hell? Oh, yeah, that's right… Silly me…

**Chapter Four:**

Jonas Schaeffer – Good story on this one. 'Jonas' jumped into my brain because of those smarmy Jonas Brothers, whom we saw on the ABC New Year's program with Miley Cyrus, Ryan Seacrest, and Carrie Underwood, who were all standing around being celebrities. I noted that the Jonas Brothers don't seem to have earned their supposed coolness. My brother replied, scathingly, "I _love_ the Jonas Brothers! I want to _be_ them!" To which I responded, "Well, I want to _marry_ them! _All_ of them! At the _same time_! In _Utah_!" And all was well. (If 'Schaeffer' sounds familiar, it may well be because you suffered through writing 'Schaeffer Paragraphs' in middle school like I did. Also, as I later realized, I had a supremely evil seventh grade history teacher whose name rhymes with "Schaeffer." Didn't even think of it at the time. Freud would be proud. And if said teacher has discovered himself here, I've got a newsflash for ya, bub: You're a bastard.) Only then Jonas decided to become the coolest guy… ever…, so that worked out all right.

Invading Russia – Oh, Napoleon. So easy to take potshots at, what with his being short, French, AND dead. Although depending on who you ask, he might've been like 5'7". Which is about six inches taller than me…

**Chapter Nine:**

"Hungry Like the Wolf" – Duran Duran, 1982 – Come on, what kind of eighties fan _are_ you?!

_Titanic_ – 1997 – I think it's safe to say that at least ninety-five percent of people reading this fic are female. Therefore, at least ninety-five percent of people reading this fic have worshiped _Titanic_ to the point of shrines and cult activity, let alone just _watched_ it. Except me; I definitely haven't seen any more than about ten minutes of it. Someday I'll get around to that. Er. Someday.

Fashion Consultants – I looked it up on Wikipedia to be smarter than my characters, all _right_?

Accountifiable – Coining new words is easy AND fun!

_Riverdance_ – snort …No, I think it's awesome. That's not sarcastic. I had a friend who did Irish step-dancing, and it was intensely hardcore.

**Chapter Ten:**

"Good Morning" – Seen in _Singin' in the Rain_, 1952, which is an utterly fantabulousiriffic movie, though Wikipedia would have me know it appeared elsewhere first.

TARDIS – It's Doctor Who's time-traveling machine, of _course_! It stands for something that almost makes sense; Wikipedia it.

**Chapter Eleven:**

Miranda – From _The Tempest_, duh! What kind of utter and uncontrollable Shakespeare geek wouldn't know _that_?

**Chapter Twelve:**

Electra Complex – Don't make me explain. Wiki Freud. Vast chunks of pop culture will become suddenly clear.

'Differently abled' – Don't ask me; I saw it in a magazine. I think it was "Exceptional Parent." Which gives you an idea.

Staggered clocks – I don't have clocks set at slightly different times. Certainly not deliberately. Um. No. I'd have to be crazy to do _that_. Ha, ha, ha, such a crazy idea…

**Chapter Thirteen:**

Snogomaniacal – _I_ thought it was cool.

"Run to the Hills" – Iron Maiden, 1982 – It's high on my list of rock-out songs, all the way. Clearly, 1982 was an extraordinary year for borrow-able music.

**Chapter Fourteen:**

A Marauder's Map of All of Britain – I always wondered why, if four sixteen-year-old boys could do it, Dumbledore didn't. Honestly. What the crap?

_Narnia_ – When I was about seven and had the books read to me, I did not notice Christian symbolism of any sort. After rereading the first one before the movie came out, it was all a lot clearer. Then again, the idea of having a _lion_ as the _Christ figure_ seems, to me, to trivialize the whole concept. Come on, C.S. Lewis. Come on. (I will now cease editorializing. Or I will after I snidely add that he mostly just wanted to be Tolkien. Then again, don't we all?)

Charades – Don't even get me started. JUST DON'T DO IT.

The Three Stooges – are surprisingly funny.

_Halloween_ – 1978 – I _think_ I've actually seen this one. My brother had a horror movie phase when we were kids. It pretty much scarred me for life.

**Chapter Fifteen:**

_Pachycephalosaurus_ – The abovementioned brother was also into dinosaurs when we were little.

Sisyphus – Greek dude? Boulder on a hill? Torment in Hades? Do your homework.

_Scrabble_ – Oh, _Scrabble_. Oh, the unparalleled agony of having all vowels.

_Twister_ – I think there is something inherently creepy about this game, at least after you turn thirteen, and all the unmediated awkwardness of adolescence commences in full force.

Christian Bale – is hot.

**Chapter Sixteen:**

"This Is How a Heart Breaks" – Rob Thomas, 2005 – In case the fact that I wrote a 7,000-word oneshot revolving around a Matchbox Twenty song didn't tip you off, I _love_ them, and I _love_ Robbie. Yes, we're on a first-name basis. _Duh_. Just like me and Billy Shakespeare.

"Lonely No More" – The only thing better than Draco singing Rob Thomas is Draco singing _more_ Rob Thomas.

Yellow apple – Golden Delicious? Golden apples of the Hesperides? Anyone? Anyone?

**Chapter Seventeen:**

Mortifiterroriblizing – You know you've made up a good word when you can't even quite trace all the pieces of it.

Aliens in stomachs – _Alien_, 1979 – I think it was the first one that had that scene. This, predictably, goes back to the brother's-horror-movie-phase bit. I spent half of that movie fleeing and the other half coming back, drawn by a kind of morbid curiosity. Not a good strategy.

Fanny packs – are frigging awesome. If you survived the nineties, you are well aware of this.

"That was right out" – _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_, 1975 – "Four shalt thou not count; neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out." And how.

**Chapter Eighteen:**

"Dangerous Type" – The Cars, 1979 – I'm big on the Cars. For the win. Hence the Cars Bar.

**Chapter Twenty:**

"Shall we go?" "Yes, let's go." – Still stolen from _Waiting for Godot_. That hasn't changed. Some things never do.

The Talented Mister Malfoy – I haven't seen or read or whatever "The Talented Mister Ripley," and as a consequence know nothing about it. Except the title. Which I borrowed.

* * *

BELIEVE IT… OR NOT.

Same drill as last time; once I've got the first chapter of the next part up, which should, again, hopefully be late this summer or early in the fall, I'll add a notification to this fic, such that alerted parties will be… alerted. Shocking, I know.

Mostly… thanks, kids. You guys are amazing.

A fair amount of you are also older than I am. Hee.


End file.
